Organizations are increasingly attuned to the value of employee-driven innovation, but creating conditions that facilitate the development of creative ideas for organizational improvement can be a challenge. Building on construal level theory, we suggest that employees’ mental representations of their organizations influence motivation, thereby promoting creativity. We conducted a two-week within-person field experiment in a Fortune 100 company, in which we manipulated construal level and coded employees’ suggestions for organizational improvement. High construal level was associated with enhanced creative idea generation (greater novelty and promotion orientation of suggestions), mediated by increased organizational identification and autonomous motivation. However, these effects were disrupted for employees who were experiencing high perceived uncertainty around organizational change. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for employee cognition and creativity in organizations.
