Effects of Leader—Member conflict asymmetry on Member’s creativity: Mediating role of psychological safety and motivation

Abstract

We examine the effects of an overlooked concept of leader-member conflict asymmetry, on a member’s individual creativity. Considering that the main stream of conflict asymmetry research rarely focused on people at different levels of hierarchical relationships, the present study addressed this limitation by examining the leader-member conflict asymmetry in one-to-multi vertical dyads. Data from 50 leader-member dyads tested our multilevel hypotheses, which showed that leader-member conflict asymmetry (i.e., the member conflict scale subtracted from the leader conflict scale) negatively relates to a member’s proactive creativity, but positively relates to member’s responsive creativity. The leader’s higher perception of conflict decreased the proactive creativity of members but increased their responsive creativity. A member’s psychological safety fully mediated the relationship between the leader-member conflict asymmetry and the member’s proactive creativity.