The Role of Motivation in Enhancing Employees’ Creativity: A Literature Review

Abstract

Organizations from different industries worldwide focus their efforts and budgets to enhance employees’ creativity which is widely perceived as a major success ingredient in today’s challenging business environment. Consequently, practitioners and managers establish reward systems to enhance employees’ creativity. However, the literature presents opposing views pertaining to the relationship between rewards and employees creativity, such that some scholars find it important to be intrinsically motivated to be creative whereby others find extrinsic motivation (e.g. rewards) to be important to enhance creativity. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive literature review by presenting prominent theories addressing the role of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in enhancing employees’ creativity. It then highlights the research questions intended to be investigated and finally presents the context of proposed empirical research. Keywords: creativity, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, rewards