Epistemic Motivation and Actively Open-Minded Thinking

December 3, 2025

Epistemic Motivation and Actively Open-Minded Thinking’s Impact on Innovative Behavior as Moderated by a Leader’s Tolerance for Disagreement within a Dental School Community

Wes Parham | 2017

Abstract

The rise of globalization has resulted in an organizational atmosphere that has been described as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA; Horney, Pasmore, & O’Shea, 2010). The increasingly VUCA environment present in the 21st century has served as a catalyst for the emergence of the concept of innovation as a vital element of organizational success. Many scholars have argued that innovation is a key component of organizational success (Amabile, 1988; De Dreu, 2006; Hammond, Neff, Farr, Schwall, & Zhao, 2011), and “organizations benefit by knowing who is most likely to suggest and implement new ideas and what conditions best foster these processes” (Hammond et al., 2011, p. 99). However, despite the interest in innovative behavior, C. H. Wu, Parker, and De Jong (2014) argued that “to date, we know relatively little about how dispositional and contextual aspects might work together” (p. 1512). The current study utilized an interactionist approach to answer the questions of “who is most likely to suggest and implement new ideas and what conditions best foster these processes” (Hammond et al., 2011, p. 99) and examined both dispositional and contextual aspects. It also examined the cognitive dispositions of epistemic motivation and actively open-minded thinking and their impact on individual innovative behavior as a way to identify who is most likely to suggest and implement new ideas while also considering whether the contextual aspect of the leader’s tolerance for disagreement moderates the relationship between these two cognitive dispositions and innovative behavior. Six hypotheses were generated to test these relationships. The study findings support the idea that epistemic motivation and actively open-minded thinking are positively linked to individual innovative behavior but have mixed results on the role of a leader’s tolerance for disagreement as a moderator of this relationship.

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