Leveraging on recent research which found that cultural tightness arising from formal versus informal organizational sources can differentially affect employee creativity, this paper examines how (in)congruence between formal and informal cultural tightness affects employee creativity. Through a large-scale field study involving 23 companies across seven Asian countries, we found that perceiving congruent levels of formal and informal cultural tightness (high-high or low-low) would enhance employee creativity more than perceiving incongruent levels (high-low or low-high) of formal and informal cultural tightness. Additionally, congruence at lower levels of perceived formal and informal cultural tightness (i.e., low-low) foster more creativity than congruence at higher levels of perceived formal and informal cultural tightness (i.e., high-high). The creative benefits conferred by a congruent culture is amplified when immediate managers adopt transformational leadership behaviors that inspire more and controls less. Lastly, it appears that when informal and formal cultural tightness are incongruent, employee creativity suffers more when informal cultural tightness was higher than formal cultural tightness, compared to the reversed configuration. These findings contribute to cultural tightness-looseness theory and creativity literature by providing insights into how cultural tightness from different organizational sources interact to affect employee creativity.
