In the workplace, employees often rely on support to carry out creative tasks. However, research on the relationship between dependence and creativity performance has yielded inconsistent results. Expertise dependence on supervisors, defined as the extent to which employees rely on their leaders’ superior knowledge, skills, or abilities, presents an opportunity to clarify this issue from the cognitive perspective of creativity. Our study investigates the individual-level process of information elaboration, examining the moderating effects of leader-member exchange (LMX) and the mediating effect of elaboration of supervisory information on the relationship between expertise dependence on leaders and creativity. Drawing on two field studies, we find that employees with low LMX who depend on leaders’ expertise knowledge engage in less elaborate supervisory information processing than employees with high LMX, which, in turn, decreases creativity. However, the negative effect is buffered when LMX is high. Our findings contribute to the literature by offering a nuanced understanding of how and when expertise dependence on supervisors impacts employees’ creative performance through information elaboration and also provide practical implications for managers to help minimize possible detrimental effects on creativity when subordinates relying on them.
