Creativity is Allowing for Failures: Leader Failure Tolerance and Employee Creativity

The creative process is inherently risky and prone to failure. To promote creativity, scholars and practitioners have advocated the importance of having team leaders who are tolerant of employees’ failures in creative activities. However, creativity research thus far has not explicitly examined the role of leader failure tolerance. To address this knowledge void, from the systems view of creativity we examine a cognitive mechanism known as bisociation, through which leader failure tolerance may influence the production of novel and useful ideas. We also examine the joint effects of leader failure tolerance and individual differences in goal orientation on creativity through bisociation. To achieve our research goal, we first develop and validate a measure of leader failure tolerance using two independent samples. Then, we test the hypothesized relationships using a sample of 210 research and development (R&D) teams comprising 632 employees. Results show that leader failure tolerance positively relates to employee creativity through bisociation. Furthermore, when leader failure tolerance is high, performance-proving goal orientation has a positive indirect effect on creativity via bisociation, while performance-avoiding goal orientation has a negative indirect effect on creativity via bisociation. Taken together, these insights have important implications for managers charged with delivering creativity.