“I BETTER NOT SAY THAT” – HOW CREATIVITY IS CONSTRAINED BY THE RULES AND THREATS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Abstract

Creativity has consistently shown to generate positive outcomes for the workplace, attracting attention from both scholars and practitioners to further investigate and understand the various determinants of creativity. While a large body of work has demonstrated that creativity flourishes when constraints are removed, scholars have increasingly found that under certain conditions, constraints can promote creativity too. This paper adds to the debate by treating political correctness as a contemporary form of constraint on creativity. I hypothesised that political correctness would sport a negative relationship with individual creativity through the mechanism of psychological safety. Furthermore, I theorised that the political correctness concept was inseparable from the threat of consequences against its transgressors, thus distinguishing the concept from adjacent constructions like politeness and sensitivity. Two experiments were conducted by simulating politically correct remarks in workplace interactions. Though there was insufficient evidence to affirm the hypothesised negative relationship between political correctness and individual creativity, findings were nevertheless insightful. Firstly, political correctness was significantly and positively associated to individual creativity when the threat of consequences was absent. This was likely an affirmation of Goncalo et al.’s (2015) study of political correctness and uncertainty reduction in mixed-sex groups which formed the chief inspiration for this paper. Secondly, political correctness and the threat of consequences were found to significantly interact in predicting both individual creativity and the proposed mediator, psychological safety. When the threat of consequences was present, political correctness was significantly and negatively related to psychological safety. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in the manuscript.