Standing on the Shoulders of Others: Network Ties and Individual Creativity

Abstract

Social network theory elaborates how network ties can generate social capital through structural access and relational mechanism, then to enhance individual creativity. By categorizing network ties into strong and weak in terms of tie strength, this article discusses how individuals may utilize differential types of network ties to come up with creativity. With less structural constraints, weak ties allow diverse and heterogeneous knowledge to prosper and facilitate building-up connections among diverse ideas to make creative attainments. On the other hand, with the relational mechanisms such as cooperation and trust, strong ties may reinforce psychological capital and in turn to sustain creativity. In summary, weak ties deliver informational benefit, one component of social capital, to directly rifle individual creativity from intellectual resource perspective; while strong ties offer solidarity benefit, another ingredient of social capital, to indirectly inspire individual creativity from psychological angle. Besides, this study highlights the moderating effect of knowledge articulability which constrains the relatedness between network ties and creativity. It hypothesizes when the extent of knowledge articulability is low, that is, low codifiability, high dependency and high ambiguity, weak ties will not be effective as for individual creativity. Two-wave survey will be employed to empirically test propositions.