New ideas are important for companies to evolve and overcome problems. This dissertation focuses on utilizing the companies’ potential for these ideas: their employees. It examines in detail extra-role creativity as a subdimension of creativity. Extra-role creativity describes the discretionary generation of new and useful ideas beyond one’s job role expectations. This subdimension has, to our knowledge, only been theoretically proposed, but not empirically assessed. The dissertation further evaluates its relation to innovation—the implementation of ideas—and performance. In addition, it examines social factors relevant to fostering extra-role creativity, innovation, and performance. It specifically looks at the influences of the direct social environment of an employee exerted through leadership behavior and different team climate dimensions. Taken together, this dissertation addresses three research questions. Each manuscript relates to one or more of the following research questions: 1) How is extra-role creativity perceived by employees? 2) What is the connection between extra-role creativity and innovation as well as between extra-role creativity and performance? 3) Which leadership behaviors or team climate dimensions are relevant for extra-role creativity, innovation, and performance
