Entrepreneurial motivations as drivers of expert creativity

Abstract

Even if creativity is an essential part of innovative work, surprisingly, little is known about the creativity of employee-experts and entrepreneur-experts. Awareness of the motivations that enhance creativity are important for any innovative company, because entrepreneurial motivations are likely to drive innovative individuals’ creativity and performance. We take the entrepreneurial motivation dimensions of achievement, materialism, flexibility and power into examination. We argue that there are differences in the motivations of employee-experts and entrepreneur-experts in relation to their creative performance. We use survey data from 423 expert respondents to analyse the relationships between these different motivations and creative performance. Our results indicate that there are both similarities and differences between the employee-experts and entrepreneur-experts in terms of their drivers of creativity. Entrepreneur creativity is driven by the motivations of materialism, achievement and power; for entrepreneurs, flexibility is not important. Meanwhile, employee-expert creativity is driven by achievement and power motivations; for this group, neither flexibility nor materialism are not important.