Supporting employee creativity is one of the major human resource challenges for organizations in the 21st century hospitality industry (Chang and Teng, 2017). This makes the need to understand the relationship between employees’ personal ability – emotional and cultural intelligences – and creative performance, acute, especially taking into account the mediating role of environmental uncertainty. The purpose of our study is to address this need. Whilst supporting efforts from organizations in improving employee creativity are widely documented, given our purpose, it is worth emphasizing that recent research highlights that managers in the hospitality industry “face several internal barriers which slow down the proper implementation of creativity principles and make it complicated to grasp the perspective of employees in this context” (Kattara and El-Said, 2014, p. 140). Hence, the purpose of our research endeavor, and its employee personal ability and environment perspectives, are most opportune and timely. Employees with the ability to “think out of the box” can create a competitive edge for the organization and better deal with the complex challenges and fast changing environment of the modern world (Jafri et al., 2016). Due to increasing competition in the hospitality industry, organizations place greater emphasis on creative performance (CP) to maximize customer service quality and satisfaction (Tsai and Lee, 2014). Creativity leads to the generation of novel and innovative ideas resulting in new product and service development (Tajeddini et al., 2017). The new products and services developed through creative ideas enable hospitality organizations to respond to the changing needs and wants of the customers and remain highly competitive (Chang and Teng, 2017). Given the established significance of employee creativity, it is not surprising that scholars have stressed the need for more in-depth research into the concept of creativity, its association with organizationally desired variables and also the personal and contextual factors which enhance or reduce it (e.g., Kim et al., 2012; State and Iorgulescu, 2014; Tsai and Lee, 2014). A close examination of the relevant literature delineates a number of potential factors which foster creativity such as ethical leadership and intrinsic motivation (Feng et al., 2016), transformational leadership and creative self-efficacy (Mittal and Dhar, 2015), proactive personality and responsibility for change (Jiang and Gu, 2015), and a high level of generosity and vigor (Carmeli et al., 2014). Related literature recognizes several personal characteristics positively related to creativity (Joseph and Newman, 2010; State and Iorgulescu, 2014), but the antecedents of creativity remain under-researched.