How Narcissism, Promotions Criterion, and Empowering Leadership Jointly Influence Radical Creativity

From a person–situation interactional perspective, this study examined a three-way interaction among narcissism, promotions based on relative performance, and empowering leadership that affects radical creativity. Drawing on trait activation theory, we theorized that the relationship between narcissism and radical creativity is contingent upon promotions based on relative performance and empowering leadership. In addition, we also hypothesized employees’ diverse information searching as an underlying mechanism linking the three-way interaction and radical creativity. We tested these hypotheses with a multi-time and multi-source field study of 462 employees in 88 teams, and as we expected, the results indicated that narcissism was positively related to radical creativity via diverse information searching when employees’ promotions are based on relative performance and their supervisors display high empowering leadership.