Summary

Workplace creativity and innovation – generating and implementing novel and useful ideas – are crucial to firms’ performance. As employees often innovate with others or are influenced by their social environment it is essential for organizations to understand how and when pervasive characteristics of social relationships, such as power, enhance or hinder creativity and innovation. Power refers to an individual’s ability to control or influence another’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviors. Throughout three essays, I developed and empirically tested three comprehensive frameworks in which I considered the interplay of power (formal and perceived) with other psychological, behavioral, and informal social network characteristics featuring collaborations. In the first essay, I found that competing for power is problematic (valuable) for collaborators with high (low) formal power when striving for higher joint creativity and that this can be explained by the negative (positive) impact of power struggles on autonomous motivation – a motivation that is experienced as initiated and regulated by oneself. In the second essay, I found that joint creativity is higher in power asymmetric dyads (i.e., two colleagues with different formal rank) than in power symmetric dyads and Simmelian friendship ties (i.e., two friends who have a friend in common) reduce the difference in joint creativity between the two types of dyads. In the third essay, I found that employees perceiving higher power over others achieved higher innovation in brokering network positions (i.e., when an employee is tied to disconnected colleagues) than employees in these positions who perceived lower power over others.