Routinization, free cognitive resources and creativity: The role of individual and contextual contingencies

In job design and creativity literature, challenging and complex jobs drive individual creativity, whereas routinization impedes creative outcomes. This study challenges this prevailing view by exploring the intermediate psychological mechanism and boundary conditions enabling the potential benefits of routinization to foster creativity in organizations. Routinization economizes employees’ use of resources in performing tasks, thereby generating free cognitive resources that can be utilized for creative problem-solving. In addition, the effect of routinization on creativity, as mediated by free cognitive resources, is positively moderated by two boundary conditions: learning goal orientation of employees and supervisor support for creativity. Field data collected from 198 engineers and technicians and 56 supervisors working in manufacturing companies in South Korea confirm the moderated mediation hypotheses. The conditional indirect effects of routinization on creativity through free cognitive resources are significant and positive when the learning goal orientation of employees and supervisor support for creativity are high. These findings highlight the need for a balanced consideration of the ambivalent effects of task complexity and routinization on employee creativity along with further investigations on the contingencies of their effects.