Abstract
In today’s rapidly changing environment, employee creativity is important for organizations to have competitive advantages for an organizational innovation, survival and long term success. Consequently, to examine how organizations can foster employee creativity can be extremely valuable to increase organizational competitiveness. Creativity researchers have examined the antecedents of employee creativity and found that personal characteristics (e.g., creative personality and openness), job characteristics (e.g., job autonomy), and work environment (e.g., team characteristics) independently or interactively influenced employee creativity. Although current creativity research has enhanced our understating about what factors influence employee creativity, less research has focused on examining how personal characteristics, job characteristics, and work environment jointly influence employee creativity.
To address this issue, we examined how creative personality, skill variety, and team characteristics (i.e., team climate for creativity and team empowerment) influenced employee creativity independently and jointly. We collected data from 157 employee-supervisor pairs from research and development (R&D) departments in 14 organizations in South Korea. The organizations include three software development companies, three pharmaceuticals companies, two construction companies, and six manufacturing companies. The employees reported on their creative personality, skill variety, team climate for creativity, team empowerment, and their own creativity, while the supervisors assessed the employees’ individual creativity. We conducted hierarchical multiple regression analyses to test our hypotheses regarding the direct relationships between creative personality, skill variety, and team characteristics and employee creativity, as well as their interactive effects on employee creativity.
The results show that creative personality, skill variety, team climate for creativity, and team empowerment significantly influenced employee creativity, respectively. In addition, as expected, creative personality, skill variety, and team climate for creativity jointly influenced employee creativity. Specifically, when skill variety and team climate for creativity were both low, the relationship between creative personality and employee creativity (assessed by the employees) was the lowest. On the other hand, when skill variety was high and team climate for creativity was high, the relationship between creative personality and employee creativity (assessed by the employees) was the highest. The similar patterns were found for the interactive effects of creative personality, skill variety, and team empowerment on employee creativity (assessed by both the employees and the supervisors).
This study provides several theoretical and practical implications. For example, the present study can contribute to creativity research by generalizing the effect of creative personality on employee creativity in South Korea context. It also extends current creativity research by examining the effects of skill variety and team characteristics on employee individual creativity. More important, this study theorized and examined how creativity personality, skill variety, and team characteristics jointly influence employee creativity. This approach has seldom been used in the literature and supports the arguments that personal characteristics, job characteristics, and work environment jointly influence employees’ attitudes and behaviors (cf. Johns & Saks, 2005; Tett & Burnett, 2003). Findings in this study have also some practical implications in organizations. For example, organizations can enhance individual creativity by selecting people who have high creative personality. Organizations that aim to encourage individual creativity need to design jobs to enhance skill variety and build team characteristics that emphasize creativity and empower team members.
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