The Malleability of Implicit Beliefs of Creativity and Creative Behavior in Telecommunication Sector

Abstract

The role of creativity and innovation in generating a competitive advantage is fundamental to the continuous expansion of the competitive telecommunication business (Clò et al., 2020; Jarvenpaa & Välikangas, 2020). The ability of telecommunication companies to respond to technological advancement is derived from their capacity to address potential solutions and delivere new ideas, products or services (Santoso et al., 2019). One important option for them to be creatives is to encourage the creative work behavior of their workforce (Alikaj et al., 2020). Therefore, employee's creativity is crucial to organizations as a fundamental strategy to remain competitive.Several scholars have attempted to determine the individual factors that are associated with creative behavior (Alikaj et al., 2020; Intasao & Hao, 2018; Puente-DÃ-az & Cavazos-Arroyo, 2017). However, little is known about how an employee's creative behavior may be affected by his/her creative mindset, be it growth or fixed (Jeong et al., 2016). Additionally, we explore the mediating roles of knowledge sharing behavior (George, 2007; Yang et al., 2018; Yuan & Woodman, 2010) and the moderating role of leader encouragement of creativity (Sarros et al., 2008), as they have proved to have an important role in promoting the creative behavior of employees in the workplace. Hence, this study applies social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986) and implicit person theory (Dweck, 1986, 2006; Karwowski, 2014) to build a theoretical framework aiming at understanding how creative mindset could impact directly the creative behaviors of employees, and in an indirect way through knowledge sharing, and how contextual factors such as leader encouragement of creativity can strengthen this impact in the telecommunications work environment.