Understanding the Receiving Side of Creativity: A Multidisciplinary Review and Implications for Management Research

Abstract

Understanding the receiving side of creativity has both scientific and practical value. Creativity can add value to organizations after it is perceived, evaluated, and eventually adopted. In this paper, we review four decades of empirical research on the receiving side of creativity scattered across several business and social science fields. A comprehensive framework surfaces out of our review, indicating four groups of factors affecting the evaluation and adoption of creativity, namely, characteristics of target, creator, perceiver, and context. Although the receiving side of creativity has received far less attention than the generative side in management literature, vibrant research efforts in other scientific fields have built a solid foundation to understand creativity receiving in the workplace. We call for more studies on this important topic and discuss how future research could contribute to its development by advancing conceptual clarity, methodological precision, and integration between theories, disciplines, and different sides of the creative process.