Linking Gender To Creativity: Role of Risk Taking and Support For Creativity Towards Creative Potential of Employees

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to lay its prime focus on the support for creativity that defines the self-analysis of creative capabilities and potential among men and women. Benefitting from the cross-level interactionist perspective, social role theory, and role congruity theory, this research developed an integrated multilevel model to examine gender differences in risk-taking behavior and determine how the contextual factor of support for creativity shapes employees' risk-taking and influences their creativity performance. Data for this study were collected from 347 employees and their respective 98 supervisors of a pharmaceutical company in Jakarta, Indonesia. The proposed cross-level moderated mediation model was tested using data obtained at two points in time from two data sources (subordinates and supervisors) working at a pharmaceutical company. The obtained data were then analyzed with Mplus. Our findings indicate that women may have lower risk-taking than men in organizational contexts. However, support for creativity restores parity between men and women through cross-level moderated mediation, such that support for creativity has a stronger effect on women's risk-taking than that of men, resulting in increased creative performance for women. Research contributions and future research directions are also discussed in the relevant sections.