Organizational justice: a potential facilitator or barrier to individual creativity

In an effort to obtain and sustain competitive advantage via creative performance, organizations often seek individuals who possess traits known to improve the likelihood for creativity. Literature suggests that contextual factors may influence the level of creative performance of individuals with creative potential. The influence of organizational justice, a prominent and pervasive environmental factor, on creative output has been largely ignored. I assert that organizational justice (i.e., distributive, procedural, and interactional) may not only moderate the relationship between creativity enhancing traits and creative performance, it may also have a main effect relationship with creative performance. Therefore, I investigate the relationship between variables found to be precursors to individual creativity, distributive justice, procedural justice, interactional justice, and creative performance in a laboratory setting utilizing undergraduate business students. Participants completed an in-basket exercise to help determine how justice issues may influence individuals with creative potential. The empirical evidence for the hypotheses is minimal. I found some support for a main effect relationship between procedural justice and individual creativity. The findings also suggest that distributive justice moderates the relationship between openness to experience and individual creative performance. Thus, there is some evidence that justice factors may have a limited relationship with individual creative performance.