Dossinger, Karyn2020-09-082020-09-082016-06https://hdl.handle.net/11299/216158University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2016. Major: Business Administration. Advisor: Connie Wanberg. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 127 pages.Employee creativity is arguably the foundation upon which successful organizational innovation rests. Little is known, however, about how the creative process begins in organizations and how new employees’ socialization influences their creative development. Using two studies, I developed and tested a social process model of new employee creativity in which proactive collaboration – taking initiative to engage with others in collective work – plays a key role in the creative process. In Study 1, I developed and validated a measure of proactive collaboration. In Study 2, I tested the proposed model using a time-lagged, survey-based field study of new employees and their supervisors over the first six months of employment. I found that newcomer proactive collaboration was positively associated with engagement in creative process behaviors (e.g., problem identification, information search, and idea generation); however, creative process engagement was not related to supervisors’ evaluations of newcomer creative performance. I also found that newcomers’ proactive collaboration was contingent upon both personal characteristics and the organizational socialization context. On average, newcomer curiosity was positively associated with proactive collaboration. Newcomers’ creative identities, formed from prior work experiences, interacted with the organizational socialization context to predict proactive collaboration: Newcomers with strong creative identities from prior jobs were more likely to proactively collaborate when the organization used divestiture, rather than investiture, socialization tactics. Due to ongoing data collection, please contact the author before citing this work.encollaborationcreativitynew employeesorganizational socializationproactive behaviorThesis or Dissertation