The question of whether narcissists are more creative than peers has attracted much scholarly attention in both psychology and organizational management sciences. Drawing from social cognitive theory, we theorized that the relationship between narcissism and creativity could be explained by individual creative self-efficacy, which depends on one's direct and vicarious experiences of creativity. Drawing from trait activation theory, we further proposed organizational valuing of creativity as a key contextual moderator that determines whether narcissism facilitates or inhibits creative self-efficacy and, in turn, creativity. We suggest that high organizational valuing of creativity will energize narcissists to put their attention and effort into both direct and vicarious experiences of creativity, enhancing their creative self-efficacy and creativity. We tested our conceptual model through a field study with data collected from 269 full-time employees working in 86 work teams. The empirical results provided support for the social cognitive explanation for the positive relationship between narcissism and creativity in the context of high organizational valuing of creativity. Our study not only resolved prior debates on the relationship between narcissism and creativity but also provided direct empirical support for social cognitive theory and the person-in-context interactionist perspective of creativity research.

Leaders’ implicit followership theory describes leaders’ personal assumptions about the traits and behaviors that characterize followers. Unlike traditional organizational behavior research, studies on leaders’ implicit followership theory can deepen our understandings of ‘how leaders and followers perceive, decide and take action’ from follower-centric perspective. Adopting 267 follower–leader dyads from 16 Chinese enterprises as our final sample, we found that: (1) positive leaders’ implicit followership theory had significant positive effect on followers’ creativity; (2) followers’ leader–member exchange with leader, intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy mediated the positive relationship between positive leaders’ implicit followership theory and followers’ creativity; (3) no significance difference was found between the mediating effects of leader–member exchange, intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy. The current study not only extended the application of social cognitive theory in leadership research, but also made contributions to the enrichment of social exchange theory and componential theory of creativity.