Leader Perfectionism—Friend or Foe of Employee Creativity? Locus of Control as a Key Contingency

This research aims to explain whether leader perfectionism toward employees fosters or hinders employee creativity. From a self-regulation perspective, we theorize that depending on employees’ locus of control, leader perfectionism can influence two regulatory states of employees (i.e., engagement and emotional exhaustion) linearly or curvilinearly, which in turn affect their creativity in opposite directions. In a lab experiment and a multisource, multiwave field study, we found that for internals, leader perfectionism had a curvilinear effect on their engagement (but no effect on emotional exhaustion) and subsequent creativity such that the effect was positive but became weaker when leader perfectionism was extreme. By contrast, we found partial support across the two studies that for externals, leader perfectionism had a positive effect on their emotional exhaustion (but no effect on engagement), which undermined their creativity. We discuss the theoretical contributions of this research and its practical implications for organizations.