3 Unpacking the Socio-cognitive Foundations of Creative Leadership

Bridging Implicit Leadership and Implicit Creativity Theories

Olga Epitropaki, Jennifer S. Mueller, and Robert G. Lord

Introduction

In their review of creative leadership, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) observed a literature paradox with regard to creativity and leadership. On the one hand, prior studies (e.g., Mumford et al., 2000; Sternberg, 2007) and practitioner literature have highlighted the importance of creativity for leadership; on the other hand, dominant leadership schemas do not include creativity as an attribute of leadership (e.g., Epitropaki et al., 2013; Lord, Foti, & DeVader, 1984; Offermann Kennedy, & Wirtz, 1994) and studies have shown that creativity may even harm an individual’s chances to be promoted to leadership positions (e.g., Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2011). But has the relationship between creativity and leadership always been so tenuous? Interestingly no. Early studies have seen creativity and leadership as two sides of the same coin: ‘genius’. In his book Genius, Creativity and Leadership, D. K. Simonton (1984: 1) viewed creativity and leadership as the two main paths toward greatness and making history. He characteristically noted,

One of the earliest attempts to explore the commonalities between leadership and creativity can be traced back to Thorndike’s (1950) work on creators and leaders. By examining 91 historical figures on 48 characteristics, four dimensions emerged: industriousness, extraversion, aggressiveness and intelligence. Two out of these four dimensions were found to be identical (and transhistorically invariant) across both leaders and creators: intelligence and aggressiveness (Simonton, 1991). Simonton (1991) further highlighted the commonalities between the two constructs and suggested that “sometimes creativity and leadership combine into a unified phenomenon, such as creative leadership” (68). He further declared, “If creativity and leadership reach extraordinary dimensions, a single term may be applied to both—genius” (68). Despite these early attempts to bridge creativity and leadership, the two research streams gradually grew apart, leading Simonton to comment in 1991, “It has become customary to treat creativity and leadership as if they are rather separate behavioral phenomena” (67). Thirty years later, this gap still prevails.

In the socio-cognitive domain of leadership perceptions and schemas in particular, leadership and creativity remain not only separate but even contradictory notions. There is a striking absence of the trait ‘creative’ from existing operationalizations of leadership schemas (e.g., Epitropaki & Martin, 2004; Epitropaki et al., 2013; Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984; Offermann, Kennedy, & Wirtz, 1994), and creative individuals are less likely to emerge as leaders (Kark et al., 2014; Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2011). Interestingly enough, in Lord, Foti, and De Vade’s (1984) list of prototypical attributes, the trait “creative” was included in the non-leader attributes list, which clearly implies that creativity is not perceived as a core characteristic of leadership (Epitropaki et al., 2013). Even in the context of creative industries where creativity is a salient attribute, the roles of the leader and the creator are many times kept separate. It is not uncommon for creative organizations to separate the creator and manager roles purposefully so that creators can specialize in generating novel ideas and managers can decide whether these ideas are going to be implemented (Benner & Tushman, 2003; Berg, 2016). As Berg (2016) notes, we many times observe an interesting oxymoron in creative settings: “many managers get promoted into management positions based on their success as creators [and] once they become managers, they often spend more time evaluating others’ ideas than generating their own” (436). How can we, thus, resolve this incongruity and bridge the seemingly separate worlds of leadership and creativity?

In this chapter, we will argue that socio-cognitive approaches to leadership (e.g., Epitropaki & Martin, 2004; 2005; Epitropaki et al., 2013; Lord & Maher, 1991; Lord, Foti, & DeVader, 1984; Shondrick, Dinh, & Lord, 2010; Shondrick & Lord, 2010) and creativity (e.g., Christensen, Drewsen, & Maaløe, 2014; Hass, 2014; Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2011; Sternberg, 1985) may help us resolve the observed creative leadership contradictions in the extant literature and managerial practice. We will first examine Implicit Leadership and Creativity Theories (ILTs vs. ICTs) content to examine points of convergence vs. divergence. We will then discuss recent dynamic views of cognitive structures and schemas that allow for higher context-sensitivity and plasticity and conclude the chapter by discussing implications for creative leadership.

Implicit Theories of Leadership and Creativity

Implicit theories are generally defined as a constellation of ideas individuals hold about a particular construct or lay beliefs about a particular phenomenon (e.g., Sternberg & Davidson, 1986). In the leadership field, ILTs have been defined as cognitive structures that are developed through socialization processes and specify the traits and attributes that characterize leaders (Lord, Foti, & DeVader, 1984; Lord & Maher, 1991). Lord, Foti, and DeVader (1984) were the first to generate a pool of 59 leader attributes (e.g., intelligent, honest, educated and dedicated) and further found that these traits differed in the level of prototypicality—i.e., the degree they matched the image of a leader participants had in mind. Some traits, such as intelligent, honest, understanding, determined, decisive were highly prototypical, others such as happy, high achiever were neutral while another category of traits such as authoritarian and dishonest, were antiprototypical. They further identified 26 non-leader attributes such as easy going, investigative and creative. Thus, in this first ILTs list, creativity is explicitly identified as a non-leader trait. Later, studies identified factors of positive or prototypical traits including intelligence, sensitivity, dedication, strength, attractiveness, charisma and dynamism (Epitropaki & Martin, 2004; Offermann, Kennedy, & Wirtz, 1994), as well as factors of negative or antiprototypical traits such as tyranny and masculinity (Offermann, Kennedy, & Wirtz, 1994). The GLOBE study in 62 different countries (House et al., 1999, 2004) identified six global dimensions of Culturally Implicit Leadership Theories (CILTs), namely, Charismatic/Value-Based, Team-Oriented, Self-Protective, Participative, Humane and Autonomous. They also listed 21 universal positive leader attributes (e.g., honest, dynamic, intelligent, motive arouser, etc.), eight universal negative leader attributes (e.g., loner, ruthless, dictatorial, etc.) and 35 specific leader characteristics that are viewed as positive in some cultures and negative in others—i.e., they are culturally contingent (e.g., ambitious, individualistic, compassionate, domineering, etc.). Once again, creativity does not appear as a leadership characteristic (neither emic or etic) in the GLOBE study. Only certain creativity-related traits such as risk taker, provocateur and unique are found in the list of leader attributes that vary across cultures (Den Hartog et al., 1999).

The importance of these leadership prototypes for the exercise of leadership in real-world contexts is critical. According to leader categorization theory (Lord & Maher, 1991), perceivers compare stimuli from the target individual (e.g., their direct manager, their CEO or a political leader) to the attributes of the abstract leadership prototype. If there is a perceived match between the target person and the leadership prototype the follower holds in memory, then the target is more likely to be seen as a leader that deserves the follower’s respect and trust. The follower will also be more willing to make the extra effort to develop high quality of exchanges with the leader and deliver superior organizational outcomes (Epitropaki & Martin, 2005). The absence of creativity (or of similar traits) as a salient trait of the abstract leader prototype (and its existence in the non-leader category) suggest two possible outcomes with regard to leader categorization: creativity will either be totally discounted by perceivers when they evaluate leaders or will influence them negatively.

A relevant study in this context is that conducted by Mueller, Goncalo, and Kamdar (2011) who tested whether the expression of a creative idea would indeed negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential. They first showed that engineers working in a company where creativity was encouraged and desired, who were rated as generating more creative ideas by their supervisors, were also rated as having lower leadership potential by these same supervisors. To address directionality (e.g., whether expressing creative ideas influenced perceived leadership potential, or perceived leadership potential influenced expressing creative ideas) the authors conducted a laboratory experiment where university students were randomly assigned to pitch either a creative or practical idea to observers, who then assessed the students’ leadership potential. The authors showed that those instructed to pitch a creative idea were seen as having lower leadership potential relative to those instructed to pitch a practical idea. It was only when the “charismatic” leader prototype was activated in a third study that the authors showed that leadership perceptions were not completely incompatible with expressing a creative idea. When participants were primed to think of a charismatic leader relative to a leader, they viewed a fictional person expressing a creative idea as having higher levels of leadership potential.

Let us now examine more closely dominant creativity schemas or Implicit Creativity Theories (ICTs). ICTs have been described as the “unique theories of the causal nature and structure in describing creativity and creative persons” (Lee et al., 2013: 77). Research has generally shown that people have implicit theories that creative people have positive traits. For example, Sternberg (1985) showed that most groups believed creative people were intelligent and wise. Runco and colleagues (Runco & Bahleda, 1986; Runco & Johnson, 2002; Runco, Johnson, & Bear, 1993) have conducted numerous studies showing that while some of the specific traits might differ across domain (e.g., in the arts vs. science), creative people were viewed as having a host of positive traits including (but not limited to): open-minded, imaginative, intelligent, curious and resourceful. Hass (2014) found evidence that across different domains (e.g., science and the arts), creative people were seen to have the ability to integrate disparate information, to be intellectual and productive as well as possess a high IQ level. Christensen and colleagues found that across many different job advertisements in an English and Danish sample, people associated “openness to experience” with being a creative person (Christensen, Drewsen, & Maaløe, 2014).

However a closer look at the research also shows a second, albeit much less consistent pattern—a dark side of being seen as creative. First, while Sternberg (1985) noted that while professors in philosophy, physics and art viewed wisdom as positively related to creativity, professors in business viewed wisdom as negatively related to creativity. Other classical work has shown that those with a creative personality have many wonderful traits such as being clever, insightful, and resourceful, are also viewed as egotistical snobbish and unmannerly (Gough, 1979). Elsbach and Kramer (2003) identified that, for the most part, creative people were viewed positively except for those categorized as “artists” who were seen as brilliant but also obscure, poor at business, extreme and quirky. Runco and Johnson (2002) showed cross-cultural evidence that people believe creative students have a host of largely positive traits, except that they are also impulsive. And while some work shows that teachers say they value creativity and teaching creative students, they also view students who perform well on creative thinking tests as disobedient and unpleasant to teach (Westby & Dawson, 1995). This dark side of creativity schemas may help us understand the observed gap between creativity and leadership. Traits such as impulsive, disobedient, poor at business and unmannerly are clearly antithetical to notions of leadership that highlight decision making, structure, task and people orientation.

In the ICTs literature another interesting idea has been explored: while we know that people have implicit beliefs about creative people, do they also have implicit beliefs about creative ideas? Scholars widely agree that creative ideas are defined as products or processes that are both novel and useful (Amabile, 1996). However, the question remains whether the average lay person also agrees with this scientific definition of creativity. The discussion of implicit theories of creative ideas has early roots in work by Teresa Amabile who in her classical paper on the “social psychology of creativity” introduces the conceptual assessment technique—a gold standard approach to measuring creativity (Amabile, 1982). When describing the method she notes, “basically, the method requires that all judges be familiar enough with the domain to have developed, over a period of time, some implicit criteria for creativity, technical goodness and so on” (1002). In this way, Amabile introduces the idea that there can be scholarly definitions of creativity that are explicit and that we may assume that these explicit scholarly definitions also reflect implicit beliefs people have about creativity. In later years, when research began to discover that people can disagree about whether certain idea cues indicate creativity (Paletz & Peng, 2008), this provided the first evidence that people’s explicit and scholarly conceptualizations of creativity may not match people’s implicit beliefs about creativity. Indeed, Loewenstein and Mueller (2016) attempted to map out a comprehensive model of the implicit theories seen to indicate creativity in the United States and China. The authors noted that these implicit beliefs bore relatively little resemblance to the explicit scholarly theories in the creativity literature. Indeed, some participants viewed the fact that an idea has ‘mass market appeal’, or ‘technology’ as indicative of creativity—neither feature reflects whether ideas are novel or useful. This finding is reminiscent of classical work in the domain of ILTs finding that people viewed a person’s height as indicative of leadership—even though whether or not a person was tall bore no resemblance to scholarly conceptual definitions of leadership (Blaker et al., 2013).

Just as there is evidence that expressing a creative idea can harm a person’s perceived leadership potential (Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2011), there is also evidence that the mere fact that an idea is novel can harm the likelihood the idea is accepted and embraced. A burgeoning number of studies have identified that people engaged in idea evaluation activities who explicitly purport to desire novelty, reject novel ideas (Boudreau et al., 2016; Criscuolo et al., 2017; Mueller, 2014), without sufficient consideration (Siler, Lee, & Bero, 2015), even when novel ideas are also high in quality (Boudreau et al., 2016). To address the puzzle of why people desire but reject creative ideas, Mueller, Melwani, and Goncalo (2012) identified that participants primed with a mindset around uncertainty intolerance explicitly stated that they valued creativity, similar to participants primed with a mindset around uncertainty tolerance. However, those primed with uncertainty intolerance also showed faster reaction times when pairing words like ‘vomit’ with creativity and words like ‘heaven’ with practicality, and, subsequently, downgraded an idea as being less ‘creative’ relative to participants in the uncertainty tolerance condition. Said differently, participants in the uncertainty tolerance condition exhibited positive explicit and implicit associations with creativity. In contrast, participants in the uncertainty intolerance condition showed evidence of positive explicit attitudes toward creativity and negative implicit attitudes toward creativity, and had a harder time recognizing a creative idea. In sum, it follows that if people experience a bias against creativity because they are in a mindset that prioritizes certainty and correctness in decision making, they may be more likely to have an automatic negative association with creativity and so downgrade creative ideas.

What are the implications for these implicit theories of creative ideas for leadership perceptions and the exercise of leadership? As noted in prior sections, prototypical leaders are expected to promote group order and diminish uncertainty by emphasizing shared goals (Phillips & Lord, 1981). Indeed, prototypical leadership traits involve being seen as “decisive” and “directive” and so knowing answers to problems (Lord, Foti, & de Vader, 1984). In contrast, creative ideas have uncertain feasibility and unproven value (Klein & Knight, 2005; Van de Ven, 1988); hence, expressing creative ideas, one hallmark of being seen as a creative person, may actually introduce ambiguity or uncertainty into the group, something which runs contrary to the prototypical views of leadership.

In sum, when we closely examine the content of ILTs as well as of ICTs and implicit theories of creative ideas, we get a better understanding of the tension between the two concepts. Whereas novelty, esthetic taste and imagination, as well as nonconformity and ambiguity prevail in the world of ICTs, structure, reliability, results and people focus are found in the world of ILTs, making the two worlds hard to converge. One possibility that creativity can relate positively to perceptions of leadership was shown but only when people have already demonstrated prototypical leadership traits (e.g., charisma). Correspondingly, the relationship between expressing a creative idea and leadership perceptions might be dependent upon whether the person expressing the idea is already in a leadership role, as those in leadership roles may be seen as already having demonstrated success, and so may not evoke the same level of uncertainty in others minds when they express an idea that is new and unproven (Kark et al., 2014). Mueller, Goncalo, and Kamdar (2011), examined “leadership potential”—instances when study participants and vignette actors were not yet in a leadership role, and so cannot speak to the possibility that having a positive track record (e.g., being in a leadership position) might shift whether people view the expression of a creative idea as a positive indicator of leadership. Another boundary condition of the Mueller, Goncalo, and Kamdar (2011) study is that they examined idea expression—not whether participants had a reputation of being creative generally. In an unpublished study, Mueller and Goncalo identified that participants viewed a job applicant as more leader-like when the applicant’s resume stated he/she was creative versus when the applicant’s resume stated he/she was practical. This finding suggests that having a reputation as a being a creative person might help a person achieve a leadership role.

Dynamic Views of Implicit Theories and Schemas

New theoretical developments in the implicit theories literature can perhaps offer a basis for a higher level of convergence between creativity and leadership domains. The connectionist perspective (Brown & Lord, 2001; Hanges, Lord, Godfrey, & Raver, 2002; Lord, Brown, & Harvey, 2001) is an advancement to previous theoretical interpretations of ILTs due to its focus on the schema activation process. Lord, Brown, and Harvey (2001) argued that leadership categories are context-sensitive, dynamic and flexible mental representations that can be generated in real-time (“on the fly”) as a response to contextual factors (e.g., task, organization or industry related). Connectionist networks are “networks of neuron-like processing units that continuously integrate information from input sources and pass on the resulting activation (or inhibition) to connected (output) units” (314). An important aspect of these models is that leadership prototypes, which are recurrent networks in which each attribute is connected to other prototypical attributes, serve as integration devices. That is, they are simultaneously influenced by top-down constraints from context (e.g., leaders, followers, groups, affect, culture) and bottom-up features such as the attributes and behaviors of a potential leader. As they become activated, these recurrent networks find the best representation or interpretation of all sources of activation. Because these systems usually complete processing before conscious attentional processes can be activated (Dinh, Lord, & Hoffman, 2014), it is likely that leadership prototypes are constructed in response to stimuli and contextual features primarily through automatic processes.

An important advantage of connectionist networks is that they allow both for stability and for flexibility of schemas. Stability comes from the pattern of connections among prototypical attributes, which changes slowly with experience, whereas flexibility comes from the different patterns of top-down constraints and bottom-up features that activate these networks (Foti, Knee, & Backert, 2008; Sy et al., 2010). They thus allow for a generic leadership schema (that is generalizable across different contexts) existing and of different node activation of the generic schema in different contexts. It is also helpful to consider the role of connectionist systems in explaining creativity in general. Researchers who investigate the operation of complex, adaptive systems (e.g., Page, 2007) emphasize that it is the integration of information from various sources that creates new structures. For example, affective reactions, general knowledge, and episodic memories may be integrated to create new thoughts or visions, which are qualitatively different than their constituent elements. Dehaene (2014) explains that the brain produces such integration all the time as it constructs conscious meaning from the activation of localized units and then feeds this meaning back to tune local units to the global, contextualized interpretation. Consciousness, then, is an emergent output of the interaction of lower level units connected by a global neuronal network. This process directly parallels social perceptions in general (see Freeman & Ambady, 2011) and leadership perceptions in specific, as the meaning created by an integrative connectionist system in each case. It seems reasonable, then, for creativity to follow similar processes.

Connectionist networks are also likely to tune creative processes to particular emotions or patterns of emotions. For example, Bledow, Rosing, and Frese (2013), found that self-reported creativity at the end of an actual work day was enhanced by a pattern of negative emotions in the morning followed by positive emotions later in the day. They explained this effect by noting that negative emotions focus group members on specific details, while positive emotions broaden people’s thoughts and the actions they consider (Fredrickson, 2001). Each of these effects can be viewed in terms of emotions setting constraints on how one’s context was interpreted, through the general process previously discussed (e.g., Dehaene, 2014). Bledow et al. also replicated these results using an experimental manipulation based on recalling and writing a short essay about an experience that made them feel “afraid, distressed, or nervous” or “happy, inspired, or enthusiastic”.

Visser et al. (2013) used an emotional contagion manipulation in which leaders displayed either happy or sad emotions, and then groups performed either analytic or creativity tasks. In two studies using this design, they found that analytic performance was better in the sad conditions, but creative task performance was better in the happy conditions. Moreover, these effects were mediated by follower reports of happy or sad emotions. Again, we might expect that connectionist networks automatically tuned motivational and information processing strategies to the emotions felt by participants. It is not only task and organizational characteristics but also emotions can influence the salience of creativity as a core trait in a leadership connectionist network.

Although, to the best of our knowledge, connectionist models have not been applied in creativity research, there is consistent evidence for domain variation and context-sensitivity of ICTs (e.g., Hass, 2014; Paletz & Peng, 2008). For example, Hass (2014) found differences in creativity trait profiles among artists and scientists and studies have shown cultural variations (e.g., Paletz & Peng, 2008). Mueller, Melwani, Lowenstein, and Deal (2018) recently proposed the social context model of creative idea recognition, which notes that a person’s social context (e.g., roles, culture) can evoke certain goals (e.g., uncertainty intolerance), which then shapes the kind of features or cues people believe indicate creativity of an idea. Given that people’s mindsets can guide the extent to which they label ideas as creative, it is also possible that the question of whether or not expressing a creative idea is viewed as a positive or negative indicator of leadership could also be partially determined by the mindset experienced by the person doing the evaluating. Further, both the traits of the target in question and the mindset of the evaluator may play a joint role. For example, evaluators primed with an intolerance to uncertainty relative to a tolerance to uncertainty might only view the expression of a novel idea as creative and so indicative of leadership if the person in question was already in a leadership role or had proven success. Along similar lines, in their connectionist model, Lord, Brown, and Harvey (2001) highlighted the role of observers’ self-schemas, i.e., organized collections of information about some aspect of the self, that can color the interpretations of a target’s behavior. If a person views themselves as creative and creativity is a salient trait of their self-schema, they will be more likely to also view creativity as a desired trait of an observed leader.

If context, self-schemas, mindsets and emotions matter for prototype activation, then in organizational contexts where creativity is a desired quality, innovation is a key strategic objective (e.g., creative industries, high technology), positive emotions prevail (e.g., via fun and playful work environments) and organizational actors see themselves as creators, creativity will be automatically activated as a salient trait of leadership. Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) discussed filmmaking as an interesting context where creativity and leadership coexist. The creative leader, i.e., the director has to generate and communicate a creative vision to the team, inspire creativity from others and synthesize the creative inputs of the team. In certain cases (e.g., F.F. Coppola), the creative product (i.e., the film) is achieved via extreme, unconventional behavior on behalf of the creative leader who deliberately induces tension and destabilizes the team in order to achieve radical innovation (Mainemelis & Epitropaki, 2013). If we think of creativity as movement from a familiar to a novel attractor in a dynamic system, then such destabilization is consistent with dynamic representations of change. For example, Stephen, Dixon, and Isenhower (2009) found that periods of instability and high uncertainty (high entropy in their terms) preceded the emergence of new problem-solving structures.

In other cases (e.g., Kathryn Bigelow), the director/creative leader effectively manages the creativity-leadership paradoxes by exhibiting ambidextrous leadership behaviors with balanced business (e.g., budget, efficiency) and innovation outcomes (Epitropaki & Mainemelis, 2016). Haute cuisine is also another interesting example where creativity is an undeniable characteristic of leadership (e.g., Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). Haute cuisine is a highly institutionalized field where one can observe a very clear hierarchical structure. The creator, i.e., the chef, is at the top of the hierarchy and is the one that generates the creative ideas and provides direction and leadership to their team to ensure the impeccable reproduction of the new recipes by second chefs and cooks. Other examples of contexts where creativity and leadership converge include the opera, top-down innovation (e.g., Steve Jobs) and entrepreneurship (e.g., Elon Musk). In such environments, creativity will be perceived as a desired quality of leadership (instead of a negative or non-leader trait) and one would expect creativity to be rapidly activated in perceivers’ connectionist network of leadership prototypes.

But what happens in traditionally non-creative contexts? Can we observe recent changes in the general ILTs? There is evidence that in addition to the contextual activation of creativity in specific organizational settings, the general leadership prototypes are also changing and recent conceptualizations include creativity as a trait. For example, Offermann and Coats (2018) very recently replicated the original ILTs factor structure of Offermann, Kennedy, and Wirtz (1994) scale but also found a new creativity factor emerging that included four traits: creative, innovative, clever and courageous. Offermann and Coats (2018) attributed the emergence of creativity as an ILTs factor in the new samples to the “U.S. economic forces emphasizing innovation as the cure for previous economic malaise, and the role of leaders in developing climates that encourage and promote discovery and invention” (9). In a recent unpublished MSc dissertation, Mueller (2017) explored the implicit leadership theories of millennials and found creativity as an ILTs factor encompassing four traits: creative, innovative, visionary and unconventional. When prompted for business leader exemplars, participants frequently named business leaders such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whom they thought were “revolutionary”, “built an empire from nothing” and were “innovative”. Lord (2018) explains such effects by noting that each new generation learns ILTs in different historical, technical and cultural contexts. It would be surprising if content didn’t change for millennials compared to individuals who grew up in the 1960–1990s and where the original samples from which ILTs were derived. It should be stressed that such differences are structural and represent differences in the content and associations of ILTs elements; not merely the dynamic adjustment of ILTs to new contexts, which is another source of change.

Toward a ‘Unified Creative Leadership’ Concept

The question remains: “are we getting closer to the unified notion of creative leadership that Simonton envisioned in the 1990s?” Recently, Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) attempted such a convergence by integrating the dispersed and fragmented literature on leadership and creativity into a unified multi-context framework of creative leadership. They suggested that creative leadership generally refers to leading others toward the attainment of a creative outcome and that it is manifested across various work contexts in three different ways: Facilitating, where the creative leader focuses on fostering the creativity of employees; Directing, where the creative leader focuses on materializing his or her creative vision through the work of employees; and Integrating, where the creative leader focuses on synthesizing his or her creative work with the heterogeneous creative works of other organizational members. As already discussed in the previous section on dynamic views of implicit theories and schemas, these three contexts have implications for the salience of creativity as a characteristic of leadership. We expect automatic activation of creativity as a leadership trait in both the Directing (e.g., haute cuisine and top-down innovation) and Integrating contexts (e.g., filmmaking) where the leader has a strong creator identity, visible creative contributions and creativity and innovation are key strategic objectives. Still, we expect little convergence between creativity and leadership in Facilitating contexts where there is limited requirement for creative contributions on behalf of the leader. Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) further observed that leadership research undertaken in traditional work settings (i.e., permanent organizations with stable employment and position-based coordination) often fails to capture the unique aspects of leadership in the more fluid creative industries. Creativity is often examined as one of many possible employee outcomes (such as job performance and work attitudes) of various leadership behaviors (e.g., transformational leadership, authentic leadership etc.) and the intricacies of the creative leadership phenomenon are not further examined. Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015) stressed that creative leadership may differ substantially from traditional forms of leadership, and as a result, it requires fresh theoretical and empirical approaches.

Socio-cognitive approaches offer us the opportunity to examine the foundational perceptual blocks of creative leadership and have a look inside the ‘black box’ of automatic processes that guide leadership and creativity perceptions. For a unified creative leadership construct to emerge, our prototypes of leadership and creativity must also change to reflect that convergence. Such change can take place via two routes: via intrapersonal prototype change and via contextual changes that make the links between leadership and creativity more salient. On the intrapersonal level, two interventions could potentially change leadership and creativity schemas: Conditioning and Selective Prototype Activation (Dasgupta & Asgari, 2004; Epitropaki et al., 2013; Gawronski & Sritharan, 2010; Martin, Epitropaki, & O’Broin, 2017). Conditioning involves pairing a concept (e.g., leader) with a new association (e.g., creator). Prior studies have used conditioning to reduce implicit gender stereotyping (Blair, Ma, & Lenton, 2001) as well as implicit race bias (Dasgupta & Greenwald, 2001). Selective Prototype Activation is another possible intervention that assumes that individuals hold multiple (positive, negative and neutral) implicit theories (Hanges, Lord, & Dickson, 2000; Lord & Shondrick, 2011). A Selective Prototype Activation intervention would involve repeated cueing of positive prototypes involving leadership and creativity such that they become chronically accessible (Kruse & Sy, 2011; Srull & Wyer, 1979).

Furthermore, given the context-sensitivity and dynamic nature of schemas suggested by the connectionist models (Lord, Brown, & Harvey, 2001), contextual changes can also help strengthen the salience of creativity as a core attribute of leadership. Organizational environments that acknowledge creativity as a key organizational value, allow free expression of ideas, encourage risk-taking, have organizational structures and systems supportive of creativity and organizational leaders who facilitate creativity or are creators themselves (e.g., Amabile, 1998; Andriopoulos & Gotsi, 2002; Robinson & Stern, 1997) will strengthen the positive and minimize the negative implicit theories of creativity.

Conclusion

In this chapter, we attempted a closer look at creative leadership from a socio-cognitive perspective. We specifically examined Implicit Leadership and Implicit Creativity Theories in order to understand the observed literature paradox that views creativity as an important but at the same time antithetical notion to leadership (Epitropaki et al., 2013; Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). Our analysis showed that despite certain trait similarities between ILTs and ICTs (such as intelligence), a substantial number of traits are different or even antithetical, especially traits related to the dark side of creativity such as disobedient, poor at business, extreme are clearly contradictory to notions of leadership that highlight decision making, structure, task and people orientation such as decisive, hard-working, helpful and understanding. The connectionist models proposed in the ILTs literature (e.g., Brown & Lord, 2001) offer a pathway to convergence as they highlight the context-sensitive, dynamic and flexible nature of schemas and allow for both stability and flexibility of implicit theories. Depending on contextual, task-, organization- or industry-related characteristics (e.g., R&D teams, creative industries) creativity can be activated as a salient trait of leadership and thus mental representations of creative leadership can be automatically constructed—‘on the fly’. Furthermore, recent ILTs scale development studies (e.g., Offermann & Coats, 2018) provide evidence for schema change of the general ILTs prototype and emergence of creativity as a key factor of ILTs in younger generations. We may thus see higher levels of convergence between leadership and creativity in the near future and Simonton’s (1991) notion of a ‘unified creative leadership’ construct may be within reach.