The Roles of Creative Self-Efficacy and Team Creative Efficacy in Employee and Team Creativity in Japanese Companies

Abstract

This study conducted a cross-sectional survey to examine the roles of creative self-efficacy and team creative efficacy in employees' and teams' creative performance in Japanese companies, which culturally emphasize group harmony. In total, 3589 employees and 476 supervisors answered the online surveys. After confirming the creative self-efficacy and team creative efficacy constructs using data on the employee subsample (n = 3231), a distinct subsample of 358 employees working in 119 teams was analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling to assess how individual- and team-level efficacy beliefs are associated with supervisors' ratings of employee and team creativity. The results showed that creative self-efficacy was positively associated with individual creativity at both the within- and the between-group levels. By contrast, team creative efficacy was negatively associated with individual creativity at the within-group level, while its between-group (contextual) effect was small and not significant. These findings suggest that discrepancies in team members' perceptions of team creative efficacy may undermine individual creative performance. Overall, this study illustrates that individual and collective efficacy beliefs have different influences on creativity across levels within teams. This highlights the need to consider creativity as a multilayered social process shaped by both individual efficacy and shared team beliefs.