Awakening employee creativity: The role of leader emotional intelligence

Creative activities are affect-laden. Laboring at perhaps the most inspiring and difficult of human endeavors, a creator frequently experiences the excitement of discovery and the anguish of failure. Engaging in creativity in organizations inevitably creates tension, conflict, and emotionally charged debates and disagreements because complex organizations need both control and predictability and creativity and change. In this paper, we describe five routes through which the innate creativity of organizational members can be awakened: identification, information gathering, idea generation, idea evaluation and modification, and idea implementation. We propose that leaders, and in particular, the emotional intelligence of leaders, plays a critical role in enabling and supporting the awakening of creativity through these five complementary routes. After describing theory and research on emotional intelligence, we develop propositions concerning how leaders’ emotional intelligence can enable and promote followers’ creativity in multiple ways. D 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.