Journal of Management & Organization, 24:1 (2018), pp. 4–18 © 2016 Cambridge University Press and Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management doi:10.1017/jmo.2016.20 When empowering leadership fosters creative performance: The role of problem-solving demands and creative personality MIEKE AUDENAERT AND ADELIEN DECRAMER Abstract The purpose of this paper is to investigate the circumstances under which empowering leadership fosters creative performance. Arguments were developed for a three-way interaction of empowering leadership, problem-solving demands and creative personality in this linkage. These arguments resulted in competing hypotheses from a fit and a compensation perspective. The results from a survey of 213 employees of a Flemish large industrial organization were used. We found that less creative employees in jobs with high problem-solving demands particularly benefit from empowering leadership. This paper adds to a more complex understanding of the effectiveness of empowering leadership by highlighting the relevance of the simultaneous interplay of contextual and personal factors. Keywords: creative performance, empowering leadership, problem-solving demands, creative personality Received 8 June 2015. Accepted 19 May 2016 INTRODUCTION L ittle is known about when empowering leadership fosters creative performance. Although empowering leadership and creative performance are intuitively linked, there are inconsistent findings about this relationship (Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005; Zhou & Hoever, 2014). Empowering leadership seems to have different effects on different employees (Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005). In order to understand these differential effects, we study the role of a job’s problem- solving demands and an employee’s creative personality. There is an intuitive linkage between empowering leadership and creative performance. Empowering leadership is the opposite of controlling leadership (Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Zhang & Bartol, 2010). An empowering leader understands that it is important to pass control to employees by sharing power and by providing impact to employees to get better results. Therefore, these leaders encourage critical thinking to explore new ideas and develop alternative approaches of working. This is why these leaders are often blessed with creative employees who are motivated to solve problems while conducting work. Employees feel in charge to exercise influence and as a consequence, they perform creatively in their work (Ahearne, Mathieu, & Rapp, 2005). This creative performance involves generating novel and useful ideas that require risk taking, coming up with solutions, information- seeking and proactive behavior of employees (Zhou & George, 2001; Amabile, Schatzel, Moneta, & Kramer, 2004). The choice to study creative performance as an outcome of empowering leadership Department HRM and Organizational Behavior, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium Corresponding author: Mieke.Audenaert@Ugent.be 4 JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATION