Employee creativity behavior based on national cultural dimensions: Observations from a comparative study

Hofstede established cultural dimensions at a nation level that can help to distinguish between diverse management skills in different countries. He confirmed that management skills are culturally specific. As far as the authors know, it is under-researched the way these cultural dimensions could be related with some factors of already validated employee creativity behaviour models; ie, it coul exist a relationship between the cultural dimension 'uncertainty avoidance' in a nation, and the individual value 'self-direction' (of employees in that nation) that encourages the individual to take risks and break out of routine, developing an independent thought and action - choosing, creating, and exploring. So, a high value of national cultural dimension 'uncertainty avoidance' could have a negative relationship with needed 'employee empowerment' to encourage to take their own decisions and, as a consequence, diminish the creative behaviour of the employees of a company The purpose of this study is to investigate how the Hofstede cultural dimensions of a concrete country have a relationship with the employee creativity behaviour in that country. It will be investigated relating three Hofstede cultural dimensions (power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and individualism) with concrete individual values and factors with validated influence on employee creativity behaviour (ie, individualistic value, openness to experience, tolerance of ambiguity or supervisor style) In this research-in-progress, two company cases are being developed to investigate the relationship between the Spanish cultural dimensions and the expected employee creativity behavior. It's investigated whether employees of these companies show creativity behaviours that could be expected from the individual level values and factors that emanate from values of their national cultural dimensions. The authors intend to answer the following research question: 'Are cultural background traits of Spanish people (based on Hosftede's dimensions) a good predictor of Spanish employee creativity behavior?