Employee creativity has become an essential element for the survival and success of contemporary organizations in the fast-changing business environment. The increased importance of team systems in the flood of information has increased the attention given to creativity in social relationships. This study adopts social comparison theory to propose a framework that shows how social comparisons of creative ability between team members influence individual creativity. In particular, this study focuses on the downward social comparison that individuals frequently experience in real team situations. We adopted multi-source field data collected from 130 employees and supervisors working in a manufacturing company in South Korea. The moderated mediation hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear modeling to address the dependence of employees rated by the same supervisor, given that employees are nested within supervisors. The effect of downward social comparison on creativity, as mediated by negative affect, is positively moderated by narcissism. Specifically, the conditional indirect effects of downward social comparison on creativity through negative affect were significant and negative when narcissism was high but insignificant when it was low. This research provides novel insights for researchers and practitioners by offering a theoretical elaboration of the effects of social comparison processes on creativity and providing unique empirical validation for the model in the context of teams in actual organizations.
Keywords: creativity; downward social comparison; hierarchical linear modeling; narcissism; negative affect; social comparison theory.