U. at Buffalo, The State U. of New York, United States
Exploration plays a critical role in achieving sustained competitive advantage. While a growing research stream on individual exploration has separately examined either individuals' formal roles or social context as predictors, we study the simultaneous interaction of individual dispositions and their context on their exploration behavior. In this paper, building bridges to the psychological literature, we hypothesize that job demands interact with individual creative disposition to influence the extent of individual exploration and performance. We empirically tested this framework using a field study of knowledge workers in an information technology firm and an experiment that involves solving a murder mystery. The findings from our studies provide broad support for our theorization and have implications for research on exploration, creativity, and job demands.
