Leader Regulatory Goal Setting and Employee Creativity

ABSTRACT Recent research suggests that leaders can influence employee creativity by shaping their followers' regulatory focus (promotion or prevention). We propose that this work has overlooked the nature of the regulatory goals (maximal or minimal) that leaders set for their followers. We performed two studies to test this: a vignette‐based experiment with 297 participants and a time‐lagged, multisource field survey involving 335 leader‐employee pairs across various Dutch organizations. Across the two studies, findings reveal that leaders who set maximal goals—emphasizing gains, advancement, and aspirations—significantly enhance their followers' creativity by boosting their promotion focus and intrinsic motivation for creativity. However, leaders who set minimal goals—emphasizing loss avoidance, security, and duty fulfillment—tend to suppress creativity among their followers due to an increased prevention focus and a propensity to conform to the leader's directives. Our novel concept of leader regulatory goal setting demonstrates incremental predictive validity beyond the effects of conventional transformational and transactional leadership styles. Our findings enrich the comprehension of the motivational interplay in leader‐follower exchanges and their creative consequences. Furthermore, this research offers valuable strategies for crafting leadership interventions that effectively stimulate employee creativity.