Marketing Organization's Regulatory Focus and NPD Creativity

Purpose – Because creativity, which is an intangible resource embedded within the company, can offer a competitive advantage, most companies have an interest in promoting creativity among their employees and division(e.g., marketing organization). Creativity renders a sustainable competitive advantage to a firm because it is a strategic resource that is valuable, flexible, rare, and imperfectly imitable or substitutable. Although most companies broadly recognize the importance of creativity, the methods for developing creativity remain elusive. Therefore, the present study investigates how to structure incentives to motivate employees to be more creative and how to develop tools to facilitate creativity. In detail, the present study aimed to examine the relationship between the regulatory focus of marketing organizations(e.g., promotion focus vs prevention focus) and creativity of marketing organizations. In addition, the present study set out to examine the moderating role of interaction of financial reward and creative training in addition to investigating the direct relationship between creativity and regulatory focus in New Product Development(NPD) context. Research design, data, and methodology – The data used to test the hypotheses are drawn from a survey of full time NPD project members(including project manager, designer, engineer, and marketer). The present study utilized data obtained mainly from a database compiled by the Korea Investors Service-Financial Analysis System which provides comprehensive corporate and financial information on firms listed on the Korea Stock Exchange. A study population comprising 1,000 South Korean firms was obtained from this database. We selected 864 firms from the database, and the firms have experiences of new product development project. We collected a total of 162 responses, for a 18.8% response rate. After we excluded 14 questionnaire because of incomplete responses, a total of 148 questionnaire remained(f