Employee Creativity in Project-Based Organizations: Inhibited or Promoted by Organizational Controls?

Abstract

Creativity and control are both vital to creative project-based organizations: The former enables innovation, adaptability, and problem-solving in uncertain or novel conditions, whereas the latter ensures alignment, stability, and goal-directed execution within constraints. Nevertheless, it remains controversial how different types of controls shape employee creativity in creative project-based organizations. This study thus aims to examine the independent and interactive effects of organizational controls on employee creativity in the creative project-based organization context. A questionnaire survey was administered in Hong Kong, involving 222 employees of architectural and engineering design firms. Using a latent moderated structural equations approach to test the hypotheses, the results reveal that formal behavior control inhibits, but social control enhances, employee creativity. There is a substitutional relation between formal outcome control and social control, whereas formal behavior control complements the effect of social control. This study extends the control–creativity research to creative project-based organizations and enriches the classic person–process–product creativity framework by incorporating a contextual dimension.