| Although scholars have emphasized the potential of helping relations among employees at workplace to encourage creativity,existing literature remained limited to individual-level creativity,whereas how such creative outcome influences organizational creativity has not been explored yet.This study intents to fill this gap in knowledge by providing new theoretical and empirical evidence by integrating creative cognitive perspective and componential theory of creativity.In this regard,a comprehensive conceptual model is developed to explain how individual-level creative activities in terms of knowledge sharing facilitate idea generation through seeking and giving help,which consequently stimulates organizational creativity.An empirical analysis is carried out by using the partial least squares method on a sample of 350 senior employees from four Chinese construction projects in Ecuador,working under one of the largest multinational enterprises.In addition,the quantile approach is also applied to investigate if the relationship varies across the conditional probability distribution of the dataset.At first,a moderated-mediation model is estimated to examine if the employees' helping relations explain the pathways through which employees' social interaction produces practical and creative ideas at the workplace.The findings reveal that the interaction of a help seeker with a help giver results in an exchange of employees' experiences and different strategies to solve creative problems.This exchange of information provides the employees an opportunity to broaden their visions,and to combine the acquired information with their existing knowledge to come up with novel and useful ideas.Specifically,help-giving predicted the generation of ideas and mediated the relationship between employees' relation quality and idea generation.Moreover,a higher level of help-seeking not only generates innovative ideas by itself but also strengthens the positive relationship between help giving and idea generation.Besides,an integrated model is also estimated to reveal that help-seeking moderates the mediated relationship between relation quality and idea generation through help giving.Secondly,the study provides a systematic explanation of how exchange relations at workplace enhance organizational creativity through the generation of new ideas.The results obtained by estimating a dual-stage moderated-mediation model provide strong evidence that the interaction of a helper with a help seeker brings creative ideas,and these ideas are then implemented by the help seeker to generate innovative procedures in routine work.Furthermore,the analysis reveals that help-seeking has a dual moderating role in the process of organizational creativity.First,by interacting with a help giver to produce creative ideas;and second,the implementing of these creative ideas to develop new procedures to support organizational creativity.In brief,the findings show that a favorable work environment stimulates the generation of creative ideas through encouraging seeking and giving help,which consequently improve organizational creativity.Finally,a statistical model is developed to explore if the effects of helping relations are different across the conditional probability distribution of organizational creativity.Specifically,we explore the possibility that organizational creativity responds differently to a lower and a higher level of help-seeking and help-giving behaviors.The results obtained from the quantile framework reveal that the potential of a help giver to generate creative ideas is always positive throughout the data distribution,while a help seeker produces novel ideas only when a threshold level of helping interaction is reached.Moreover,though the interaction of a help seeker with a help giver is positively related to organizational creativity,as we move from the lowest to the highest percentile of data distribution,the direct impact of help giving on creativity decreases gradually.This finding indicates that help giving has a double-edged sword effect.It not only nurtures the creativity process by sharing valuable knowledge and generating creative ideas,but also entails the cost of helpingc others by decreasing their creativity.Considering that,while helping others,a help giver wastes resources in terms of time and energy that can be utilized by himself to produce creativity.Nonetheless,if we account for the indirect effect of helping through idea generation,the overall role of help giving is decisive and greater than a help seeker.This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge from the theoretical,methodological,and empirical aspects.First,it models the employees' helping interaction in an organization to solve most business problems by generating creative ideas.Second,the complex mechanism of employees helping relations and organizational creativity is revealed to facilitate collective creativity,which also provide a framework for future research.Finally,a theoretical and methodological framework is developed and estimated to show that the application of a simple linear regression might not provide sufficient information on the underlying process of organizational creativity.The findings of this research provide building blocks to foster innovation within the organization to respond to the dynamic challenges of modern business... |
PDF Full Text Request