Connecting and Creating: Tertius Iungens , Individual Creativity, and Strategic Decision Processes

Abstract

Research Summary: In contrast to previous research that emphasized macro‐to‐macro relationships, this study investigates how strategic decision characteristics shape the creative process at the organizational micro‐level. Whereas individual creativity thrives on novel combinations of diverse knowledge and perspectives, we argue that the characteristics of strategic decisions influence the extent to which employees’ combinatory activities enhance their creativity. Multilevel modeling results based on 638 employees from 34 organizations show that the positive relationship between tertius iungens (TI) orientation and creative performance is reinforced by strategic decision comprehensiveness, especially when coupled with low strategic decision speed. The results suggest that, paradoxically, when top managers consider a narrower range of options and act more quickly to respond to challenges in the external environment, they risk constraining creative processes within the organization.
Managerial Summary: To innovate, managers are often advised to make strategic decisions based on changes in their external business environment. Our research suggests that managers should also consider how strategic decision‐making enables the social processes through which employees generate creative ideas essential to organizational innovation. Our results show that employees who bring people in their network and their diverse ideas together (i.e., the tertius iungens [TI] orientation) tend to improve creative performance. However, for those employees is it easier to develop creative ideas when strategic decisions are comprehensive and slow? Paradoxically, when top managers consider a narrower range of options and act more quickly to respond to challenges in the external environment, they risk constraining the social processes that lead to creativity within the organization.

Full text

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE
Connecting and creating: tertius iungens, individual
creativity, and strategic decision processes
Olli-Pekka Kauppila
1
| Lorenzo Bizzi
2
| David Obstfeld
2
1
Department of Management Studies, School of
Business, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland
2
Management, Mihaylo College of Business &
Economics, California State University Fullerton,
Fullerton, California
Correspondence
Olli-Pekka Kauppila, Department of Management
Studies, School of Business, Aalto University,
Helsinki, Finland.
Email: olli-pekka.kauppila@aalto.fi
Funding information
The Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation,
Grant/Award number: 40367/10
Research Summary: In contrast to previous research that
emphasized macro-to-macro relationships, this study
investigates how strategic decision characteristics shape
the creative process at the organizational micro-level.
Whereas individual creativity thrives on novel combina-
tions of diverse knowledge and perspectives, we argue
that the characteristics of strategic decisions influence the
extent to which employees’combinatory activities
enhance their creativity. Multilevel modeling results
based on 638 employees from 34 organizations show that
the positive relationship between tertius iungens
(TI) orientation and creative performance is reinforced by
strategic decision comprehensiveness, especially when
coupled with low strategic decision speed. The results
suggest that, paradoxically, when top managers consider
a narrower range of options and act more quickly to
respond to challenges in the external environment, they
risk constraining creative processes within the
organization.
Managerial Summary: To innovate, managers are often
advised to make strategic decisions based on changes in
their external business environment. Our research sug-
gests that managers should also consider how strategic
decision-making enables the social processes through
which employees generate creative ideas essential to
organizational innovation. Our results show that
employees who bring people in their network and their
diverse ideas together (i.e., the tertius iungens
[TI] orientation) tend to improve creative performance.
However, for those employees is it easier to develop crea-
tive ideas when strategic decisions are comprehensive
and slow? Paradoxically, when top managers consider a
narrower range of options and act more quickly to
respond to challenges in the external environment, they
Received: 27 August 2015 Revised: 15 August 2017 Accepted: 18 September 2017 Published on: 11 December 2017
DOI: 10.1002/smj.2728
Strat Mgmt J. 2018;39:697–719. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/smj Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 697

risk constraining the social processes that lead to creativ-
ity within the organization.
KEYWORDS
combinatorial efforts, creativity, strategic decision
comprehensiveness, strategic decision speed, strategy-
making
1|INTRODUCTION
To keep pace in today’s accelerated, competitive contexts, firms increasingly rely on their ability to
innovate through the generation of novel and useful ideas (George, 2007; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham,
2004). Strategy scholars have long emphasized that strategic decision processes create a context for
innovation and other activities that help firms remain competitive in their businesses (Floyd & Lane,
2000; Hart, 1992). However, empirical studies, which have focused primarily on strategic decision
comprehensiveness and speed (Eisenhardt, 1989; Souitaris & Maestro, 2010), offer mixed recom-
mendations. One perspective emphasizes the importance of comprehensive search and analysis of
various alternatives for making strategically astute decisions (Miller, Burke, & Glick, 1998; Priem,
Rasheed, & Kotulic, 1995; Simons, Pelled, & Smith, 1999). The contrasting perspective suggests
that instead of extensive information analyses, strategic decisions should rely on top managers’heu-
ristic rules of thumb (Artinger, Petersen, Gigerenzer, & Weibler, 2015; Bingham & Eisenhardt,
2011) or analogies (Gavetti, Levinthal, & Rivkin, 2005). Similarly, authors who have theorized on
strategic decision speed reach opposing conclusions. Researchers either urge firms to make fast stra-
tegic decisions to seize emerging opportunities before they disappear (Baum & Wally, 2003;
Judge & Miller, 1991; Kownatzki, Walter, Floyd, & Lechner, 2013) or warn about the deleterious
effects of high decision speed (Forbes, 2005; Perlow, Okhuysen, & Repenning, 2002).
One possible reason why research on strategic decision process characteristics has been incon-
clusive is that prior studies have focused almost exclusively on distal organizational outcomes, such
as organizational innovation and performance. While these studies have generated many valuable
insights, organization-level outcomes are heavily influenced by environmental factors exogenous to
the strategy process, making the analyses complex and the findings unstable (Dean & Sharfman,
1996; Miller, Washburn, & Glick, 2013). At the same time, previous models fall short in analyzing
more proximate effects of strategic decision processes at the micro-level. This is a serious limitation
because the contributions of individual employees are essential for the generation of organizational
outcomes. Focusing on micro-level outcomes enriches the insights into the implications of strategic
decision processes, allowing the exploration of their multilevel interplay with employee characteris-
tics. The investigation of such multilevel interplay reveals how strategic processes not only interact
with macro external factors, but also intervene in the micro social processes of individuals, stimulat-
ing employees’responses that vary depending on their personal characteristics (Mintzberg &
Waters, 1985). In this study, we focus on the interactive roles of strategic decision process character-
istics in shaping the micro-level process leading to one critically important form of employee
contribution—employee creative performance. Creativity refers to the development of novel and
useful ideas, which originate primarily from employees (George, 2007; Perry-Smith, 2006;
698 KAUPPILA ET AL.

Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). Employee creativity is the starting point for organizational
innovation (Baer, 2012; Zhou, 2003), which emerges when the organization implements creative
ideas into products, services, or procedures (Amabile, 1988; Anderson, Poto
cnik, & Zhou, 2014).
Drawing on research on the interplay between strategic decision processes and the behavioral
dynamics of individuals (Floyd & Lane, 2000; Hitt & Tyler, 1991; Mollick, 2012; Perlow et al.,
2002), we propose that the strategic decision process attributes are contextual variables that interact
with individual characteristics to influence employees’creative outputs. Within the organization, the
development of creative ideas is essentially an ongoing combinatory process (Fleming & Sorenson,
2004; Tiwana, 2008) that is driven by encounters and interactions between individuals (Kim &
Mauborgne, 1998; Turner & Makhija, 2012). The tertius iungens (TI) orientation construct explains
this individual-level combinatorial activity. Following Obstfeld (2005), we define TI orientation as
an individual strategic orientation toward introducing unconnected others or facilitating new coordi-
nation between previously connected actors. Individual action is the fundamental unit of analysis
that underlies combinatorial processes leading to innovation (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999; Morge-
son & Hofmann, 1999). However, such individual processes are influenced by the surrounding orga-
nizational context (Morgeson & Hofmann, 1999; Turner & Makhija, 2012). In particular, the
organization’s strategy-making has a strong influence on how employees direct their attention and
engage in various activities in the organization (Hart, 1992; Hitt, Beamish, Jackson, & Mathieu,
2007; Kownatzki et al., 2013). Due to this interaction, we examine how the characteristics of strate-
gic decision processes at the organization’s macro-level shape the effect of TI orientation on creative
performance at the organization’s micro-level.
By examining how macro-level strategic decision processes interact with micro-level TI orienta-
tion to influence employee creativity, this study makes three main contributions. First, we extend
prior research on strategic decision processes (Forbes, 2005; Papadakis, Lioukas, & Chambers,
1998; Souitaris & Maestro, 2010) by explaining how strategic decision characteristics influence
activities at the organizational micro-level. Specifically, we show that low levels of strategic deci-
sion comprehensiveness and high speed have previously unrecognized side effects of suppressing
the positive effects of employees’TI orientation on creativity. These results challenge the popular
recommendations to pursue fast and heuristic strategic processes in business environments where
creativity plays a critical role. Second, our findings extend the micro-foundational view of strategy
making by elucidating how the relationships between micro-level factors and performance outcomes
are contingent on the macro-level processes within which individuals are embedded (Barney &
Felin, 2013; Teece, 2007). We suggest that although individual agency underlies all organizational
strategies and outcomes, these micro-level value-creation activities are enabled or constrained by
macro-level strategic processes. Third, we contribute to both strategy-making and social network
research by extending the understanding of the mechanisms and conditions by which networking
processes rather than network structures affect strategically relevant outcomes (Obstfeld, Borgatti, &
Davis, 2014).
2|THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Although it is inarguably important to understand how strategic decision processes conform to the
demands of the external environment, it is also important to consider how strategic decisions interact
with organizational member characteristics to shape work behaviors at the micro-level (Hitt et al.,
2007). Within an organization, individual employees work toward organizational objectives, solve
the organization’s problems, and create new ideas and initiatives that add value to the organization
KAUPPILA ET AL.699

(Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999; Turner & Makhija, 2012). As Barlett and Ghoshal (1993) argued,
knowledge and expertise are the most focal strategic resources, and managers should therefore
ensure that the organizational context is supportive of individual initiative, collaboration, learning,
and creativity.
Research has underscored that creativity stems from social interactions in which people combine
their unique perspectives and bits of knowledge (Fleming & Sorenson, 2004; Harvey & Kou, 2013;
Perry-Smith, 2006). To combine and coordinate novel ideas and bits of knowledge that are impor-
tant for innovation but dispersed across the broader social network (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999),
Obstfeld (2005) suggested that individuals with high TI orientation have a predisposition to intro-
duce disconnected others and facilitate the collaboration between parties who are already acquainted.
The author conceptualized TI orientation as individuals’strategic orientation toward connecting peo-
ple in their social network.
A strategic orientation refers to the preferred means of approaching problems and pursuing goals
in a social context (Levine, Higgins, & Choi, 2000), and it motivates individuals to initiate and
engage in goal-directed behaviors (Frese & Fay, 2001). Orientations are individual dispositions that
explain differences in behavior, remain relatively stable over time, and are not specific to a certain
task or situation (Chen, Gully, Whiteman, & Kilcullen, 2000). While individual orientations are rela-
tively stable, their influence on behavior tends to depend on situational factors (DeRue & Wellman,
2009; Hirst, Van Knippenberg, Chen, & Sacramento, 2011). Building on these insights, we suggest
that whereas TI orientation is a dispositional trait-like individual difference that remains relatively
stable across time and situations, TI-oriented individuals can be motivated to focus their joining
efforts toward different types of activities, depending on the situational characteristics. For instance,
TI-oriented individuals may concentrate only on connections that facilitate efficient implementation
(Shi, Markoczy, & Dess, 2009; Tiwana, 2008) or the enhancement of their social capital (Xiao &
Tsui, 2007). Similarly, TI-oriented individuals’motivation to pursue creative activities is likely to
vary as a function of situational characteristics.
Research has demonstrated that the effects of orientations on employee creativity are bounded
by the characteristics of the broader organizational context (Gong, Kim, Lee, & Zhu, 2013; Hirst
et al., 2011). We combine these insights with the idea that the organization’s strategy making influ-
ences organizational members’behavioral processes (Hart, 1992) to suggest that the characteristics
Strategic decision
comprehensiveness
Strategic decision
speed
Creative
performance
Tertius iungens
orientation
Characteristics of the strategic
decision-making process
H2: + H3: -
H1: +
H4: -
Firm level
Individual level
FIGURE 1 Conceptual model
700 KAUPPILA ET AL.

of the strategic decision context interact with individuals’TI orientation to influence creativity, as
displayed in Figure 1. Specifically, we identify two ways in which the social context can motivate
employees to direct their connecting efforts toward the attainment of creative outcomes. First, indi-
viduals with a disposition to connect others will focus their joining efforts toward creative initiatives
if managers, or others, are likely to become aware of these initiatives. Individuals become motivated
to pursue creative ideas when managers and other organizational members are exposed to their crea-
tive ideas (Brown & Baer, 2015; Shalley et al., 2004). The characteristics of strategic decisions are
relevant because they affect how managers and others are exposed to and responsive to employees’
creative ideas (Hart, 1992).
Second, individuals with a disposition to connect others will be motivated to focus their joining
efforts toward the development of creative ideas if the social context encourages their efforts and
does not penalize the pursuit of new ideas (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996; Kim-
berly & Evanisko, 1981). A firm’s strategic decision-making can shape the social context to encour-
age or discourage employees’efforts to generate creative outcomes. Whereas in some strategic
contexts employees are encouraged to exert effort toward generating and completing new initiatives
or creative projects (Morrison & Phelps, 1999; Obstfeld, 2012), in other contexts, these activities
can be labeled as nonconforming or deviant behaviors (Mainemelis, 2010; Yuan & Woodman,
2010). Taken together, these arguments suggest that the strategic decision context plays a significant
role in regulating the relationship between TI orientation and creativity. Next, we will explain how
TI orientation influences creativity and then develop our hypotheses regarding how key characteris-
tics of strategic decision processes may shape this relationship.
3|TERTIUS IUNGENS ORIENTATION AND EMPLOYEE CREATIVITY
While individual creativity has often been argued to be the most crucial element of organizational
innovation, this type of creativity depends on the social context and relationships in which an indi-
vidual is embedded (Amabile, 1988; Woodman et al., 1993). The development of new ideas and ini-
tiatives begins at the individual level, where individuals’diverse ideas, social relationships, and
novel combinations of knowledge generate competing ideas to challenge existing organizational
rigidities (Floyd & Wooldridge, 1999). Specifically, employees’social relationships are important
sources of diverse perspectives and different bits of knowledge and skills that—when brought
together—increase creativity (Hirst, Van Knippenberg, Zhou, & Quintane, 2015; Perry-Smith,
2006). The diversity of knowledge and ideas is a necessary precondition for initial creative insights,
but the integration of diverse knowledge and ideas is equally important for obtaining creative perfor-
mance (Fleming, Mingo, & Chen, 2007; Mors, 2010).
Although innovation is distinct from creativity, it is worth noting that Obstfeld (2005) found
individual TI orientation to be an important predictor of individual involvement in innovation. His
argument is that connecting others enables both the alignment of different interests and the knowl-
edge combination necessary for organizational innovation. The alignment of interests motivates
unconnected or uncoordinated others to engage in knowledge integration. Then, the combinatorial
action, joining various actors and their interests, leads to the innovation found in certain organiza-
tional routines, and most notably, in creative projects (Obstfeld, 2012).
Building on the notion that creativity accrues not only from knowledge diversity, but also from col-
laboration and other-focused psychological processes (Reagans & Zuckerman, 2001; Tiwana, 2008;
Uzzi & Spiro, 2005), we expect TI orientation to positively influence creativity. Grant and Berry (2011)
demonstrated that the prosocial desire to help or contribute to other people guides employees to develop
KAUPPILA ET AL.701

ideas that are both novel and useful. Fleming et al. (2007) argued that joining others in common initia-
tives can facilitate the generation of useful new ideas by increasing mutual ownership and a deeper
understanding of other actors. As individuals with a high TI orientation are focused on connecting peo-
ple in their social network, they are likely to strive to identify the needs and opportunities for joining
activities. That is, to introduce or revitalize interaction between parties, TI-oriented individuals need to
find a structural gap where acting as a link between unconnected or uncoordinated others is meaningful.
By linking otherwise unconnected or uncoordinated others, an individual is directly exposed to diverse
knowledge that yields the opportunity to combine ideas, and such combinations are a primary source of
creative ideas (Fleming et al., 2007; Perry-Smith, 2006).
Furthermore, after an individual brings two or more unconnected others together, he or she will
also continue to participate in ongoing knowledge combination, consequently leading to greater
opportunities to develop new ideas that emerge during different phases of collaboration (Shi et al.,
2009). Participation in collaborative process stimulates creativity because it enables the ongoing
sharing and extension of complex, tacit, and confidential knowledge over time (Amabile et al.,
1996; Kogut & Zander, 1992). These types of processes typically involve brainstorming, the sharing
of ideas, and joint problem solving that stimulate different parties’creativity (Uzzi & Spiro, 2005).
Although the collaborative processes facilitated by TI-oriented individuals could increase network
closure over time, combinations may also engender trust and reciprocity that facilitate further subse-
quent combinations. Obstfeld et al. (2014) noted that TI-oriented combination and re-combination
can occur in both closed and open networks, allowing TI-oriented actors to generate creative ideas
across different network types. Thus, we posit:
Hypothesis 1 (H1) TI orientation is positively associated with individual creative
performance.
4|THE ENABLING ROLE OF THE STRATEGIC DECISION-MAKING
CONTEXT
To examine how characteristics of the strategic decision process shape the relationship between TI
orientation and creative performance, we focus on the contextual effects of two strategic decision
process dimensions, each of which has a prominent role in strategy process research: comprehen-
siveness and speed (Baum & Wally, 2003; Forbes, 2007; Souitaris & Maestro, 2010). Fredrickson
and Mitchell (1984, p. 402) defined strategic decision comprehensiveness as “the extent to which an
organization attempts to be exhaustive or inclusive in making and integrating strategic decisions.”
For strategic decisions to be comprehensive, decision-makers must consider multiple issues and cri-
teria in making decisions, conduct multiple examinations to determine the appropriate course of
action, and search extensively throughout the organization to find possible responses to strategic
problems (Atuahene-Gima & Li, 2004; Miller et al., 1998). Strategic decision speed refers to the
velocity of the strategic decision-making process from the initial moment at which possible courses
of action are considered to the moment at which the commitment to act is made (Eisenhardt, 1989).
Speed and comprehensiveness capture two distinct aspects of the strategic decision process
(Souitaris & Maestro, 2010), and researchers have identified fast strategic decisions that are more
(Eisenhardt, 1989) and less (Atuahene-Gima & Li, 2004) comprehensive.
702 KAUPPILA ET AL.

4.1 |Moderation by strategic decision comprehensiveness
We expect comprehensive strategic decisions to facilitate the emergence of a context that motivates
TI-oriented employees to focus their joining efforts toward the development of creative initiatives.
There are two fundamental attributes of comprehensive strategic decisions that enhance the relation-
ship between TI orientation and creativity. The first attribute relates to the extent to which managers
engage in a broad and extensive search to collect information (Miller et al., 1998; Souitaris & Mae-
stro, 2010). As organizations with comprehensive strategic decision processes seek and consider var-
ious ideas and perspectives from multiple sources within the organization (Goll & Rasheed, 1997),
employees’initiatives to tap into diverse perspectives and generate creative ideas are more likely to
become visible to management. According to Hart (1992), a comprehensive strategic decision pro-
cess “combines the elements of top-management intention and organizational member initiative”
(p. 340). Organizations with comprehensive strategy making are characterized by a high level of
employee involvement that is supported by a formal system for considering, evaluating, and valuing
creative ideas that stem from the micro-level (Hart, 1992). Even when employees have personal
resources to develop creative ideas, they require support from the organizational context, which
gives them the perception that their ideas can be heard and become visible at higher levels (Chang,
Takeuchi, Jia, & Cai, 2014). Thus, employees with a high TI orientation will be motivated to direct
their joining efforts toward developing creative ideas if they know that management scans the inter-
nal context and openly searches for inputs at all levels, becoming aware of employees’initiatives,
and hence, incentivizing their development.
The second attribute of comprehensive strategic decisions is that the organization engages in
extensive analyses of strategic alternatives and the development of various responses. When organi-
zations with comprehensive strategic decisions are confronted with threats or opportunities, they
seek to develop various alternative responses, consider different criteria, and examine multiple
explanations for possible courses of action (Souitaris & Maestro, 2010). An environment that wel-
comes multiple alternative approaches to strategic issues creates a perception that creative contribu-
tions from employees are valued, encouraged and appreciated (Hirst et al., 2011). Accordingly, we
argue that the organization’s emphasis on the analysis and development of strategic alternatives
motivates TI-oriented employees to pursue outcomes that depart from the usual. In contrast, non-
comprehensive strategic decision processes are often driven by top management’s entrepreneurial
vision and heuristics (Artinger et al., 2015; Bingham, Eisenhardt, & Furr, 2007; Mintzberg &
Waters, 1985). Organizations with less comprehensive strategic decisions may actually discourage
or devalue TI-oriented members’self-initiated creative projects because these activities may produce
answers to the wrong questions and may create outcomes other than those intended by top managers
(Hart, 1992; Wooldridge, Schmid, & Floyd, 2008). Therefore, TI-oriented individuals will feel a
lower motivation to focus their joining efforts toward creative initiatives. Accordingly, we hypothe-
size the following:
Hypothesis 2 (H2) Strategic decision comprehensiveness moderates the positive rela-
tionship between TI orientation and creative performance such that the relationship is
stronger when the level of strategic decision comprehensiveness is high.
4.2 |Moderation by strategic decision speed
In contrast to the enabling role of strategic decision comprehensiveness, we suggest that strategic
decision speed suppresses the effects of TI orientation on creativity. In fast strategic decision-
KAUPPILA ET AL.703

making, employee initiatives are often overlooked as organizations tend to focus on the insights of
experienced individuals (Baum & Wally, 2003) and rely primarily on the knowledge of top execu-
tives or members of the board of directors (Eisenhardt, 1989). Bingham and Eisenhardt (2011)
found that top managers tend to make fast strategic decisions using heuristics that leverage the les-
sons learned from experience in similar situations. Similarly, Wally and Baum (1994) found that
firms facilitate strategic decision speed by using top managers’intuition and by centralizing author-
ity to top managers. Moreover, to accelerate decision processes, top managers tend to focus their
attention on task-relevant domains and selectively ignore other domains (Nadkarni & Barr, 2008).
Thus, in contexts characterized by high decision speed, employees with high TI orientation may per-
ceive that the organizational context is not open to diverse perspectives and that there are fewer
opportunities to capture the attention of top management with creative initiatives. Organizational
members may perceive that top management’s scant time and attention indicate unresponsiveness to
employees’initiatives, impairing their efforts to pursue creativity autonomously (Dutton & Ashford,
1993). Hence, fast strategic decisions may discourage TI-oriented individuals from devoting their
joining efforts to creative activities, and direct their attention to something else, such as building
social capital more generally.
Furthermore, an emphasis on speed in strategic decisions generates a self-reinforcing sense of
urgency and time pressure in an organization that increasingly values decision speed at the expense
of decision content (Perlow et al., 2002). The sense of urgency may discourage employees with a
disposition toward connecting others from persistently cultivating emergent and uncertain combina-
tory activities that are often necessary for creative outcomes. In fact, when management externally
imposes time pressure through a sense of urgency, employees perceive the environment to be less
supportive of creative combinatory endeavors (Amabile et al., 1996). Moreover, fast decision pro-
cesses may discourage TI-oriented individuals from focusing sustained joining activity toward crea-
tive initiatives because of the expectation that there will be insufficient time to allow new creative
projects with novel combinations of actors and ideas to unfold. Employees could therefore perceive
less control over their joining efforts, suppressing the motivation for persistent participation in crea-
tive activities (Byron, Khazanchi, & Nazarian, 2010). This is relevant because to fully realize the
benefits that TI orientation offers for creativity, the employee should persist in the collaborative pro-
cess after having initiated collaboration (Obstfeld, 2005; Shi et al., 2009). Finally, Beck and Schmidt
(2013) found that time pressure impairs learning and makes employees more likely to avoid new sit-
uations with uncertain outcomes. As self-initiated creative projects with emerging combinations of
ideas, people, and resources involve a high level of learning and risk-taking (Obstfeld, 2012), TI-
oriented employees are less likely to remain actively involved in these projects when their organiza-
tional context is characterized by a high (rather than low) strategic decision speed. Hence, we
propose:
Hypothesis 3 (H3) Strategic decision speed moderates the positive relationship
between TI orientation and creative performance such that the relationship is weaker
when strategic decision speed is high.
4.3 |Three-way interaction among tertius iungens orientation and the two characteristics of
strategic decision processes
Building on our arguments, slow strategic decision processes appear to be most effective when they
are simultaneously comprehensive. Slowness alone may not be particularly helpful for encouraging
704 KAUPPILA ET AL.

TI-oriented individuals to focus on creativity if slowness is an element of a coercive bureaucracy
that constrains employees’motivation to contribute to nonroutine activities and stifles their creativity
(Adler & Borys, 1996). Overall, the mere availability of time has less value if executives are not
receptive to the initiatives of organizational members and do not attempt to consider and integrate
various perspectives into an overall strategy (Eisenberger, Armeli, Rexwinkel, Lynch, & Rhoades,
2001). When top management has time to pay attention to employees and there is a formal process
that supports management’s receptiveness to employees’self-initiated efforts, employees perceive a
supportive organizational environment that empowers their efforts aimed at creative outcomes
(Adler & Borys, 1996), which motivates TI-oriented individuals to focus their efforts toward creativ-
ity. Therefore, a slow decision speed may reinforce the impact of TI orientation on creativity in a
particularly effective manner when the level of comprehensiveness is high.
By the same token, a slow strategic decision speed may augment the positive moderating effects
of strategic decision comprehensiveness. Slow strategic decision processes may reinforce the influ-
ence of comprehensiveness by allowing adequate time to gather various perspectives, develop alter-
native responses, assess different options, and make integrated decisions without time pressure
inhibiting employees’learning orientation and risk tolerance (e.g., Beck & Schmidt, 2013). Ohly,
Sonnentag, and Pluntke (2006) elucidated that routinized processes enhance employees’self-
initiated creative activities when routinization leaves employees sufficient time to think about their
work. Perlow et al. (2002) demonstrated that fast strategic decision processes impede the effective
functioning of comprehensive decision processes. Even when employee efforts toward joining activ-
ities are intense and well directed, they are less likely to increase creative performance if rapid stra-
tegic decision processes inhibit TI-oriented employees’persistent participation in the combinatory
process. On the basis of these arguments, we predict that TI orientation will lead to the greatest
increase in creative performance in contexts in which strategic decision processes are simultaneously
highly comprehensive and slow.
Hypothesis 4 (H4) There is a three-way interaction among TI orientation, strategic
decision speed and strategic decision comprehensiveness in predicting creative perfor-
mance: TI orientation will have the strongest positive relationship with creative perfor-
mance when the level of decision comprehensiveness is high and decision speed
is low.
5|METHODS
5.1 |Sample and data collection
Our data were collected from 638 employees and 192 middle managers from 34 organizations
located in Finland. The organizations operated in a variety of sectors, including metals and machin-
ery, food products, furniture, media, information technology, and housing services. Our research
focused on organizations in various industries to improve the external validity of our results. More-
over, as employees’creative outputs that pertain to “all parts of organizations and all aspects of their
operation”(Damanpour, 1991, p. 556) are relevant for organizational innovation, we chose to exam-
ine creative processes of organizational members across various functions. To recruit participants,
we distributed newsletters that outlined the broad research objectives and provided instructions for
participation through two focal Finnish associations that are focused on organizational development.
The organizations that indicated interest in participating were then contacted and asked to provide
KAUPPILA ET AL.705

the researchers with a list of volunteering managers and employees along with their contact details.
At time 1, we sent email invitations to respond to an online survey to 261 middle managers and
1,713 employees within the 34 participating organizations. We conducted two surveys, one for the
middle managers and the other for organizational members (employees). Conducting separate sur-
veys helped reduce potential common method variance because the firm-level independent variables
and the individual-level dependent variable were obtained from different sources (Podsakoff, Mac-
Kenzie, Lee, & Podsakoff, 2003).
Of the contacted individuals, 192 middle managers and 1,004 employees completed the survey,
yielding response rates of 74 and 59%, respectively. To collect data on our dependent variable, we
sent another survey 12 months after the initial survey to employees who responded at time 1. Of
these individuals, 638 employees completed the survey at time 2, which resulted in a response attri-
tion rate of 35.5%. Thus, the final sample consisted of 638 employees nested within 34 organiza-
tions. The organization-level measures were based on the assessments of 192 middle managers. The
average age of the employees in the final sample was 42 years, and they had been in their current
positions for an average of five years. A slight majority of the respondents were female (53%), and
63% of them had at least a bachelor’s degree. The employees most commonly had degrees in engi-
neering and technology (38%), business and social sciences (24%), and healthcare and nursing
(21%). The employees’most common responses regarding their main tasks in their organization
were customer service (34%), product development (22%), and projects and operations (12%).
5.2 |Measures
All measures had been validated in previous research, and they were translated from English to
Finnish (the questionnaire language) using a translation-back-translation procedure. To further
increase the reliability and validity of the data, the survey instrument was pretested with a sample of
21 university students and employees before the actual data collection. The pretest resulted in only a
few minor refinements in some of the item wordings. A five-point Likert scale ranging from
1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) was used for all survey items.
5.2.1 |Creative performance
We measured creative performance with the three-item self-report creative performance scale devel-
oped by Shalley, Gilson, and Blum (2009). The scale was designed to be suitable for a sample of
employees in diverse occupations. The scale includes items such as “The work I produce is creative”
and “The work I produce is novel”(α= .87). Because our sample was drawn from varied occupa-
tions across 34 highly dissimilar organizations, self-reports were the only available and suitable
measures of creativity. Although not immune to limitations, the self-report measure of creativity has
recently been reconsidered by scholars (e.g., Baer, 2012; Bledow, Rosing, & Frese, 2013; Ng &
Lucianetti, 2016; Shalley et al., 2009) and deemed appropriate to use in particular contexts (Ng &
Feldman, 2012). Appendix 1 in File S1 provides a detailed explanation of the reasons why the self-
report measure of creative performance is suitable to our empirical context.
5.2.2 |Tertius iungens orientation
We assessed our independent variable tertius iungens orientation using a scale developed by
Obstfeld (2005), which asked employees to evaluate their TI orientation using five items. Sample
items include “I introduce two people when I think they might benefit from becoming acquainted”
and “I will try to describe an issue in a way that will appeal to a diverse set of interests”(α= .84).
706 KAUPPILA ET AL.

5.2.3 |Strategic decision comprehensiveness
Following Souitaris and Maestro (2010), we captured strategic decision comprehensiveness with a
five-item scale developed by Miller et al. (1998). The survey asked managers to report agreement or
disagreement with statements such as “Faced with an immediate, important, nonroutine threat or
opportunity, our firm usually…considers many different criteria and issues when deciding the course
of action to take”and “…searches extensively for possible responses”(α= .81). Strategic decision
comprehensiveness is a firm-level (level 2) construct, with assessments provided by managers aggre-
gated at the firm level (on average, 5.6 managers per firm).
To justify the aggregation of managers’ratings at the firm level, we computed the average r
wg(j)
to indicate the inter-rater agreement. We also computed interclass correlations (ICC) to examine the
percentage of variance in strategic decision comprehensiveness ratings that is attributable to firm
membership (ICC1) and the reliability of firm means (ICC2). Values for the indexes are as follows:
average r
wg(j)
= 0.88, ICC1 = 0.09 (p= .037), and ICC2 = 0.35. In support of aggregation, the
ICC1 is significantly different from zero and within the typical range of ICC1 values reported in
organization studies (Bliese, 2000). Although the ICC2 was comparable to ICC2 values reported for
firm-level constructs in the literature (e.g., Bacharach & Bamberger, 2007; Lam & Mayer, 2014; Ou
et al., 2014), it was smaller than ideal. This may mitigate effect sizes in cross-level relationships and
make our results conservative, but is not an obstacle to aggregation (Bliese, 2000). Because ICC2 is
constrained by the number of raters, relatively modest ICC2 values are typical in organization stud-
ies, where the group sizes tend to be small. Moreover, because ICC values are based on between-
firm variation relative to total variation, they were constrained in this study by limited variation in
firms’strategic decision comprehensiveness. Nonetheless, a high level of inter-rater agreement and
significant intra-class correlations support data aggregation at the firm level (Bliese, 2000; LeBre-
ton & Senter, 2008).
5.2.4 |Strategic decision speed
We measured a firm’s strategic decision speed using a three-item scale developed by Souitaris and
Maestro (2010). In our analysis, we omitted one of the three original items because of its low item-
to-total correlation (0.22) and because its inclusion would have produced inadequate reliability (α
= .61). We suspect that the reason for the low item-to-total correlation was that the item, which was
reverse-coded, did not explicitly address the speed of decision-making but rather asked about the
organization’s tendency and preference to take its time when making strategic decisions. Firms that
emphasize fast decision processes may also take the time they need to make decisions, whereas the
reverse of the omitted item (i.e., “not taking our time when making strategic decisions”) might have
negative connotations of rash rather than fast decision-making. The following two items were used
to assess strategic decision speed: “In our firm, we believe in making quick strategic decisions”and
“Please check the extent (1 being ‘not at all’to 5 being ‘to a great extent’) to which your company
emphasizes speed when planning or thinking about strategies”(α= .81). Both inter-rater reliability
indexes (ICC1 = 0.13, ICC2 = 0.45) and the average value of inter-rater agreement (r
wg(j)
= 0.78)
supported aggregating managers’ratings at the firm level.
5.2.5 |Control variables
We controlled for key personality characteristics to mitigate the risk that the relationship between TI
orientation and creativity is spurious. First, we controlled for risk propensity, which has been identi-
fied as a key determinant of creative behavior (Woodman et al., 1993). Risk propensity measures
the dispositional tendency to engage in new activities with uncertain outcomes (Ng & Feldman,
KAUPPILA ET AL.707

2012) that could underpin both TI orientation and creative behavior. To capture risk propensity, we
used four items from Colquitt, Scott, Judge, and Shaw ([2006]; e.g., “I seek adventure”and “I take
risks,”α= .79). Second, we controlled for learning orientation, which is an important predictor of
employees’creative behavior and a rival explanation for TI orientation (Hirst, Van Knippenberg, &
Zhou, 2009). Learning orientation is another fundamental determinant of creativity because it makes
individuals seek new challenges and experiences (Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009) or the discovery of
new solutions (Elliott & Dweck, 1988). This variable was measured by four items from Gong
et al. (2009). Sample items include “In my job, I prefer tasks that arouses my curiosity, even if they
are difficult to learn”and “In my job, I prefer tasks that really challenge me so I can learn new
things”(α= .72).
We also controlled for employee gender (0 = male, 1 = female), age (natural logarithm), posi-
tion tenure, field of education, and functional area within the organization. A series of dummy vari-
ables captured the effects of the respondents’fields of education. Similarly, a series of dummy
variables controlled for the respondents’primary organizational function. To control for social desir-
ability effects, we added Yun, Takeuchi, and Liu’s (2007) four-item measure of the self-
enhancement motive (e.g., “It is important to me to give a good impression to others”and “I try to
modify my behaviors to give good images to others;”α= .82). Individuals with a high social-
enhancement motive desire to see themselves in a positive light (Pfeffer & Fong, 2005) and may
rate themselves high in both TI and creativity, causing possibly spurious relationships.
At the firm level, exogenous environmental conditions, such as technological turbulence and
market growth, are likely to influence the need and opportunities for employees to initiate creative
projects. We used a four-item scale to capture technological turbulence (sample items: “The technol-
ogy in this industry is changing rapidly”and “It is very difficult to forecast where the technology in
this area will be in the next few years”) and a three-item scale to capture market growth (sample
items: “The growth rate of this industry in the past three years is very high”and “The market
demand in this industry is growing rapidly”). Both scales were taken from Zhou and Wu (2010),
TABLE 1 Descriptive statistics and correlations
Variables Mean SD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Individual-level (N = 638)
1. Individual creativity 3.28 0.89 1
2. TI orientation 3.79 0.62 0.28 1
3. Self-enhancement motive 3.07 0.75 0.16 0.11 1
4. Learning orientation 4.35 0.47 0.25 0.33 0.12 1
5. Risk propensity 2.48 0.76 0.16 0.25 0.08 0.11 1
6. Gender (1 = female) 0.53 0.50 −0.13 −0.01 0.07 0.04 −0.18 1
7. Age 41.71 10.39 0.01 0.08 −0.16 −0.06 −0.17 0.06 1
8. Position tenure 1.92 0.67 −0.02 −0.02 −0.08 −0.07 −0.11 0.04 0.45 1
Firm-level (N = 34)
1. Strategic decision
comprehensiveness
3.12 0.34 1
2. Strategic decision speed 3.08 0.53 −0.01 1
3. Technological turbulence 3.29 0.61 0.19 0.29 1
4. Market growth 3.12 0.76 0.02 0.25 0.32 1
Notes. Italicized correlations are statistically significant at p< .05. Dummy variables indicating employees’educational background
and functional area in the organization are excluded from the table to conserve space. These data are available from the authors on
request.
708 KAUPPILA ET AL.

and their Cronbach’s alphas were .85 (technological turbulence) and .87 (market growth). Managers
assessed technological turbulence and market growth, which were aggregated to form firm-level
constructs. For both variables, high intra-class correlation and inter-rater agreement measures
TABLE 2 Results of hierarchical linear modeling analyses of individual creativity
Model 1 Model 2
Variables CE SE p-Value CE SE p-Value
Level 1 variables
Intercept 3.27 (0.05) .000 3.27 (0.05) .000
Gender (1 = female) −0.11 (0.08) .164 −0.13 (0.08) .119
Age (log) 0.28 (0.14) .042 0.24 (0.12) .053
Position tenure 0.01 (0.06) .856 0.02 (0.06) .746
Education 1
a
0.28 (0.18) .129 0.28 (0.20) .148
Education 2
a
−0.01 (0.15) .922 0.02 (0.15) .875
Education 3
a
−0.02 (0.16) .916 −0.03 (0.15) .844
Education 4
a
−0.60 (0.52) .253 −0.65 (0.58) .261
Education 5
a
−0.07 (0.26) .786 −0.08 (0.22) .715
Education 6
a
−0.14 (0.11) .192 −0.15 (0.10) .152
Organizational function 1
b
−0.14 (0.13) .288 −0.20 (0.14) .139
Organizational function 2
b
−0.35 (0.24) .145 −0.39 (0.24) .106
Organizational function 3
b
−0.17 (0.13) .184 −0.22 (0.14) .106
Organizational function 4
b
−0.44 (0.22) .051 −0.52 (0.22) .019
Organizational function 5
b
−0.72 (0.29) .014 −0.66 (0.28) .017
Organizational function 6
b
−0.10 (0.10) .341 −0.09 (0.11) .401
Organizational function 7
b
−0.02 (0.12) .860 −0.03 (0.14) .800
Organizational function 8
b
0.10 (0.11) .395 0.06 (0.12) .622
Self-enhancement motive 0.15 (0.04) .000 0.14 (0.04) .000
Risk propensity 0.09 (0.05) .085 0.07 (0.06) .241
Learning orientation 0.42 (0.07) .000 0.33 (0.07) .000
TI orientation 0.20 (0.06) .000
Level 2 variables
Strategic decision comprehensiveness 0.08 (0.15) .587 0.09 (0.16) .586
Strategic decision speed −0.03 (0.12) .833 −0.01 (0.11) .929
Technological turbulence −0.12 (0.11) .296 −0.10 (0.11) .378
Market growth 0.28 (0.10) .006 0.29 (0.09) .005
Interactions
TIO × comprehensiveness 0.43 (0.18) .016
TIO × speed −0.15 (0.11) .187
Comprehensiveness × speed 0.05 (0.30) .864
TIO × comprehensiveness × speed −0.52 (0.21) .013
Pseudo R
2
0.12 0.15
N
Level 1
= 638; N
Level 2
= 34.
a
Dummy variables for educational background: 1 = arts and humanities, 2 = business and social sciences, 3 = engineering and tech-
nology, 4 = behavioral sciences, 5 = natural sciences, 6 = health and social work.
b
Dummy variables for primary functional area: 1 = sales, 2 = marketing and communications, 3 = general administration, 4 =
human resources, 5 = finance and accounting, 6 = customer service and support, 7 = R&D, 8 = projects and operations.
KAUPPILA ET AL.709

(technological turbulence: ICC1 = 0.45, ICC2 = 0.82, average r
wg(j)
= 0.88; market growth: ICC1
= 0.51, ICC2 = 0.86, average r
wg(j)
= 0.88) justified aggregation across raters.
6|ANALYSES AND RESULTS
Before testing the hypotheses, we conducted confirmatory factor analyses to evaluate the discrimi-
nant validity of the perceptual measures. The results for the variables collected from employees indi-
cated that the measurement model had an acceptable fit with the data (χ
2
(160, N = 638) = 774.55,
p= .001, RMSEA = 0.078, CFI = 0.92, NNFI = 0.90, SRMR = 0.061). The measurement model
based on the variables collected from the managers fit the data well (χ
2
(71, N = 192) = 81.69,
p= .180, RMSEA = 0.028, CFI = 0.99, NNFI = 0.99, SRMR = 0.044). As the measures of TI
orientation and creative performance were collected from the same source, we conducted Harman’s
single-factor test to estimate the extent to which common method variance was present in this rela-
tionship. The exploratory factor analysis yielded two distinct factors with all items loading on their
intended constructs, with high loadings (lowest: 0.71) and low cross-loadings (highest: 0.15). Nei-
ther of the factors accounted for the majority of the covariance among the measures, indicating that
significant common method variance is unlikely to be present in the data (Podsakoff et al., 2003).
Given the hierarchical nature of the data, we used two-level hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)
(Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002) with the dependent and independent variables at level 1 (individual
level) and the firm-level variables at level 2. We began by testing a null model for creative perfor-
mance with no predictors. The null model allowed us to examine the proportion of variation in crea-
tive performance that was attributable to predictors at different levels. The analyses revealed that
11% of the variation in creative performance was between firms, and 89% was between individuals
within firms. The significant (p< .001) variation in creative performance between firms justified
the use of HLM as the appropriate analytical technique.
Descriptive statistics and correlations are reported in Table 1. Table 2 presents the results of our
HLM analyses. In analyzing the model, we grand-mean-centered the predictors to avoid collinearity
problems. Of the control variables, employee age, learning orientation, and self-enhancement moti-
vation were positively and significantly related to creative performance. Employees working in
finance and accounting tasks exhibited significantly lower levels of creative performance, and the
negative coefficient indicating employees in human resources approached significance. Moreover,
the positive association between an employee’s risk propensity and creative performance was mar-
ginally significant. The firm-level variable market growth had a positive effect on employee
creativity.
6.1 |Hypothesis testing
Hypothesis 1 states that an organizational member’s TI orientation is positively associated with his
or her creative performance. As shown in Table 2, the results of Model 2 suggest that TI orientation
has a positive effect on creative performance (β= 0.20; p= .000), supporting Hypothesis 1. In
Hypothesis 2, we argue that strategic decision comprehensiveness positively moderates the relation-
ship between TI orientation and creative performance. Model 2 also shows that the interaction effect
was positive and significant (β= 0.43; p= .016). The simple slopes plotted in Panel A in Figure 2
indicate that TI orientation is positively related to creativity when the organization’s strategic deci-
sion comprehensiveness is high (β= 0.35; p= .000), but not when it is low (β= 0.06; p= .320).
These findings lend support for Hypothesis 2. However, Hypothesis 3, which predicts that strategic
710 KAUPPILA ET AL.

decision speed weakens the positive association between TI orientation and creative performance,
was not supported: Although the interaction between TI orientation and strategic decision speed was
expectedly negative, the coefficient was not significant (β=−0.15; p= .187).
The results in Model 2 in Table 2 further show that the coefficient for the three-way interaction
was negative and significant (β=−0.52; p= .013). Panel B in Figure 2 illustrates the pattern of
these interactions. Supporting Hypothesis 4, the plotted interactions demonstrate that employees
with a high TI orientation (i.e., 1 sd. above the mean) attained the highest level of creativity when
the organization’s strategic decisions were simultaneously slow and highly comprehensive. Interest-
ingly, the plotted interaction also shows that the lowest level of creativity was observed among
employees who had a relatively low TI orientation (i.e., 1 sd. below the mean) and worked in orga-
nizations with a slow and comprehensive strategic decision-making style. Indeed, under slow and
comprehensive strategic decision-making, employees with high TI orientation attain approximately
22% higher creative performance as compared to those with low TI orientation. Thus, depending on
the TI orientation levels of organizational members, comprehensive and slow strategy making can
lead to either fairly low or high levels of creativity. It is important to note that the effect sizes
2.50
3.00
3.50
4.00
(a)
(b)
Low TI orientation High TI orientation
High
comprehensiveness
Low
comprehensiveness
Creative performance
2.50
3.00
3.50
4.00
Low TI orientation Hi
g
h TI orientation
Creative performance
(1) High
comprehensiveness,
High speed
(2) High
comprehensiveness,
Low speed
(3) Low
comprehensiveness,
High speed
(4) Low
comprehensiveness,
Low speed
FIGURE 2 Plotted interactions for creative performance. Panel A: Interaction between TI orientation and strategic decision
comprehensiveness. Panel B: Interaction between TI orientation, strategic decision comprehensiveness, and strategic decision
speed
KAUPPILA ET AL.711

depicted in plotted interactions are limited by low standard deviations of strategic decision process
variables. For example, a one standard deviation increase in strategic decision comprehensiveness
corresponds to only a 6.8% increase on the measurement scale, as “high”(3.46) and “low”(2.78)
values are relatively close to the mean value (3.12) of comprehensiveness. Therefore, the slopes are
likely to be substantially steeper when considering cases that are more representative of different
sides of the measurement scale. Indeed, when plotting relationships at two standard deviations below
and above variable means, employee creativity under high comprehensiveness and a low speed
ranges between 2.02 (low TI orientation) and 4.57 (high TI orientation).
We also tested the significance of slopes as reported in Appendix 2 in File S1. We found that
for TI orientation to improve creativity, the organization’s strategic decision comprehensiveness
needs to be medium to high, and its strategic decision speed needs to be low to medium. When
comprehensiveness is low, TI orientation has no positive influence on creativity regardless of the
speed of strategic processes. Similarly, when strategic decision speed is high, TI orientation will not
have a significant effect on creativity, irrespective of the level of comprehensiveness. Compared to
all the other conditions, the condition of low speed and high comprehensiveness is significantly (p
< .001) more supportive of the positive effect of TI orientation on creativity.
Because R
2
statistics are not available in multilevel analyses, the effect sizes are estimated using
pseudo R
2
, which provides an approximate estimate of the coefficient of multiple correlations based
on the proportional reduction in residual variance as a result of adding the predictors in the model
(Hofmann, 1997). Our final model explains 15% of the variance in creativity, which bears a compar-
ison with the effect sizes of extant studies examining employees’creative performance. Similar stud-
ies of individual creative performance have reported R
2
s between 8 and 19% (Bledow et al., 2013;
Chang et al., 2014; Perry-Smith, 2014) and pseudo R
2
s between 4 and 12% (Chen, Farh, Campbell-
Bush, Wu, & Wu, 2013; Hirst et al., 2009, 2011). The incremental contribution of our hypothesized
relationships above and beyond control variables is 3%, which is also comparable to earlier studies.
However, different from most studies, our research controls for the effects of three perceptual variables,
two of which are individual characteristics with moderately high correlations with TI orientation (risk
propensity and learning orientation). These correlated variables are likely to partly mask the relationship
between TI orientation and creativity. Finally, the effect sizes are likely to be somewhat conservative
because the variability in creative performance was increased by a relatively long time lag and the het-
erogeneity of participants and organizational contexts. Regardless of these diluting factors, the effect
sizes are highly significant and comparable to those observed in earlier research on employee creativity.
6.2 |Supplementary analyses
We undertook additional tests to ensure the robustness of our results. First, we examined the role of
outlier cases of extremely low TI orientation in the results. In the distribution of TI orientation, three
individuals had a reported TI orientation of 1.0, whereas the second lowest TI orientation score in
the data set was 1.8. We removed the three individuals who reported the lowest TI orientation
values and re-ran the analyses. These analyses produced the same results as the hypothesis tests.
That is, in the full-blown model, the coefficient for TI orientation was positive and significant (H1:
β= 0.18, p= .001), strategic decision comprehensiveness significantly moderated the effect of TI
orientation (H2: β= 0.52, p= .003), and strategic decision speed significantly influenced creative
performance through its three-way interaction with TI orientation and strategic decision comprehen-
siveness (H4: β=−0.65, p= .003). However, similarly to the analysis of the complete data set, the
two-way interaction between strategic decision speed and TI orientation on creative performance
was not significant (H3: β=−0.06, p= .623).
712 KAUPPILA ET AL.

Second, as our model controls for the effects of individual characteristics (risk propensity and
learning orientation) that correlate with TI orientation, it is possible that these variables have unin-
tended confounding effects. When testing our model without employees’risk propensity and learn-
ing orientation, the coefficient for TI orientation is positive and significant (β= 0.32, p= .000).
Compared to the research model, the incremental contribution of TI orientation to creative perfor-
mance is substantially greater when risk propensity and learning orientation are excluded from the
analyses (i.e., ΔPseudo R
2
= 6%). This finding suggests that in addition to its unique effects, TI ori-
entation explains a proportion of the same variance in creative performance with other individual
characteristics. The coefficient for testing Hypothesis 2 remains significant (β= 0.40, p= .027),
Hypothesis 3 remains unsupported (β=−0.17, p= .109), and the coefficient for the three-way
interaction among TI orientation, strategic decision comprehensiveness, and strategic decision speed
confirms Hypothesis 4 (β=−0.54, p= .012). Finally, we tested the significance of a squared term
of TI orientation in the model. However, the coefficient for the squared term was low and insignifi-
cant, and its inclusion did not change the results. Overall, these supplementary analyses indicate
support for the robustness of the results.
7|DISCUSSION
Research on strategic decision-making has sought to understand how different aspects of strategic
decision-making processes relate to firm performance, but these investigations have not specified
exactly how these processes enable employees to perform better. This article presents a theory and
evidence for how employees’TI orientation affects creative performance and how the strategic
decision-making process moderates this relationship. The findings confirm the beneficial effects of
TI orientation on creative performance while highlighting the enabling and constraining role of the
strategic context. Whereas we found decision comprehensiveness to strengthen the relationship
between TI orientation and creative performance, we did not find decision speed to have the hypoth-
esized negative moderating effect. Then again, we found evidence for a three-way interaction in
which the effect of TI orientation on creative performance was strongest when the decision process
is simultaneously slow and highly comprehensive.
Our study offers a number of contributions to management research. First, whereas past research
on strategic decision processes has focused on the macro-level relationships between process charac-
teristics and firm performance (Baum & Wally, 2003; Forbes, 2007; Priem et al., 1995), we focus
on how these processes influence micro-level processes to obtain creative outcomes. Our approach
suggests that organizational outcomes may not only follow directly from decision processes, but
rather unfold as an outcome of a more multilayered interplay between macro-level strategic
decision-making and micro-level individual processes. Whereas it has been extensively debated
whether or not being fast and omitting comprehensive analyses helps organizations respond effec-
tively to exogenous changes (Bingham & Eisenhardt, 2011; Souitaris & Maestro, 2010), our results
suggest that this type of strategy-making may not be the most viable option to support self-initiated
creative collaboration among employees. Our finding that employees’TI orientation will improve
creativity only in strategic contexts characterized by low speed and high comprehensiveness is an
issue that senior managers might factor in when considering how to go about making strategic deci-
sions given employees’voluntary efforts to promote collaboration, knowledge combination, and cre-
ative initiatives, which are key drivers of innovation in organizations (Kim & Mauborgne, 1998).
Second, we contribute to the strategy-making literature by identifying a new complementary role
between the different attributes of strategic decision processes. Previous authors reached distinct
KAUPPILA ET AL.713

normative conclusions on how strategic decision processes should be pursued (Souitaris & Maestro,
2010). Eisenhardt (1989), for example, posited that effective organizations should have both highly
comprehensive and fast decision processes. The micro-implications of strategic decision processes
propose a different view: high levels of comprehensiveness alongside low speed foster micro-level
innovation outcomes, as TI-oriented individuals are motivated to initiate and sustain innovation pro-
jects. However, our results are not in conflict with those of Eisenhardt. Whereas our results pertain
to the outcomes of micro-level social processes, Eisenhardt studied the ability of top managers to
influence firm performance. Overall, our results enrich the debate regarding the role of strategic
decision-makers in shaping organizational effectiveness (Hart, 1992; Mintzberg & Waters, 1985).
Interestingly, comprehensive, slower decision-making may enable a broad base of relatively sponta-
neous and rapidly developing innovation projects. This combination may constitute an important
alternative path toward firm adaptation to environmental change and even a source of dynamic capa-
bility that may be fostered by the executive level while occurring outside of it.
Third, our work has implications for research on the micro-foundations of strategic management.
This literature has typically focused on the macro-predictors of micro-level outcomes and the aggre-
gation of micro-phenomena to macro-outcomes rather than on the interplay between macro- and
micro-level variables (e.g., Barney & Felin, 2013). Although Abell, Felin, and Foss (2008) acknowl-
edged the possibility of these cross-level interactions, little research has advanced our understanding
of how micro-level processes can be enabled or constrained by factors at the firm level. Whereas
underlying micro-level processes are vital for understanding the relationship between macro-level
antecedents and outcomes, it is equally important to understand how macro-level factors constrain
or enable micro-level activities.
Fourth, we contribute to the understanding of the relationship between network processes and
creative outcomes. Our findings provide insight into the benefits of TI orientation—a process-based
social network variable that complements and extends existing structure-based social network vari-
ables (Obstfeld et al., 2014). We extend Obstfeld’s (2005) findings that TI orientation affects indi-
viduals’contributions to organizational innovation, by showing how TI orientation can have a
positive effect on individual creativity and by demonstrating that its outcomes are contingent on the
social context. Our results might also supplement research regarding the effects of network structure
on creativity (Burt, 2004) by suggesting how theoretical and empirical attention not only to the net-
work structure, but also to the network process and its impact on creativity, can enhance the study
of crucial organizational outcomes.
Our findings also have implications for practitioners. The strategic decisions of top management
may not only directly affect organizational outcomes, but also indirectly affect them through their
influence on frontline individual creative pursuits. Normative prescriptions may vary depending on
the focus on macro- or micro-factors. For instance, if organizations want to improve organizational
performance through first-mover advantages, they might emphasize fast strategic decision-making
and move quickly under the leadership of top management (e.g., Sull, 2009). However, organiza-
tions that seek to foster microsocial creativity might temper their strategic decision speed. More
broadly, our results demonstrate to managers an important trade-off that can foster more sophisti-
cated strategic decision-making.
The article has certain limitations that provide opportunities for future research. An ongoing
debate concerns whether creative performance is most accurately measured using self-ratings or
supervisor or peer ratings (e.g., Baer, 2012; Bledow et al., 2013). As is always the case with self-rat-
ings, individuals may have inaccurate views of their own performance. However, assessments of the
creative performance of other actors can also introduce bias because people may not directly observe
714 KAUPPILA ET AL.

or be able to objectively evaluate the creative activity of others (Liao, Liu, & Loi, 2010; Shalley
et al., 2009). Nevertheless, future studies using external ratings or objective indicators of creative
performance would help verify the relationships found in this study. The risks of common method
variance in this study were mitigated because the data on creative performance were collected
12 months after the data on TI orientation. Furthermore, the risks of common method variance did
not affect the moderating hypotheses because strategic decision-making factors were measured by
managers at the higher level of analysis.
As only 34 organizations were analyzed at level 2, firms scoring extremely low or extremely
high on strategic decision characteristics are not represented in the data set. The lack of extreme
observations is expected because of the small sample size and the normal distribution of strategic
decision variables. Another limitation is that we could not aggregate individual creative performance
at the firm level, limiting causal inferences regarding whether and how the study variables would
contribute to organization-level creativity. This limitation is somewhat mitigated by the prevailing
theoretical view that organizational creativity is an additive outcome of members’creative perfor-
mances (Woodman et al., 1993); hence, it is likely safe to assume that higher creative performance
by any employee will generally enhance the creativity of the entire organization. However, future
research is needed to extend our model to verify the path from micro- to macro-level performance.
In addition, although the tertius iungens measure captured the social network process, our study did
not capture a measure of social network structure, which might have provided greater insight into
the combinatorial dynamics that were the focus of this study.
In conclusion, this article examined how the interplay between the strategic decision-making
context and individuals’propensity for orchestrating network action (i.e., the TI orientation) explains
creative performance. We found that the way in which top decision-makers make strategic decisions
is likely to influence employees’perceptions that self-starting creative projects are encouraged and
guided by the organization and that the organization motivates its members to persistently partici-
pate in these processes. In this way, the strategic decision processes of organizations can act to
enable or constrain individual behaviors, and in turn, affect the relationship between TI orientation
and creativity. The article also contributes to the social network literature by placing an emergent
network-as-process perspective into a broader, more macro-organizational context. Finally, our study
contributes empirical insight to an important but primarily theoretical dialogue about the micro-
foundations of strategy and the interactions of the micro- and macro-phenomena more broadly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are grateful to Editor Steven Floyd and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful guidance,
constructive feedback, and insightful suggestions throughout the review process. We also wish to
thank Kristiina Mäkelä and Henri Schildt for their valuable comments and inputs on earlier versions
of this article.
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article.
How to cite this article: Kauppila O-P, Bizzi L, Obstfeld D. Connecting and creating: tertius
iungens, individual creativity, and strategic decision processes. Strat Mgmt J. 2018;39:697–
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