Questionable necessity effects on creativity in the workplace: A comment on Mercier and Lubart (2026)

Mercier and Lubart analyzed data (N = 1384) with necessary condition analysis (NCA) and concluded that creativity self-efficacy and, to a lesser degree, creative process engagement, creative personal identity, openness to experience, and creative personality appeared necessary for creativity in the workplace. However, it has been established that necessity effects in NCA may be spurious due to correlations between the variables. Here, we estimated ranges of spuriousness across 1000 necessity effects estimated in data generated to have the same sample size and correlations between variables as in the data used by Mercier and Lubart. The necessity effects reported by Mercier and Lubart did not fall above these ranges of spuriousness, meaning that the reported effects may have been spurious and the conclusions by Mercier and Lubart premature. It is important for users of NCA to be aware that necessity effects in NCA do not prove necessity any more than correlations prove causality. We recommend researchers using NCA to scrutinize their findings by estimating, as we did here, ranges of spuriousness and to require that necessity effects fall above this range before claiming necessity.