| Along with the deepening of globalization,the world economy has undergone a series of profound technological changes and institutional reforms.On the one hand,a more flat teamwork mode has become the basic unit of work within organizations,and the interaction between team members and leaders has been continuously enhanced and their interpersonal influence continuously increased.On the other hand,innovation has gradually become the core competitiveness of enterprises.As the building blocks of innovation,individual creativity has drawn more and more attention.Both practitioners and scholars have been dedicated to promote employee creativity.However,few studies have focused on the personal costs of creativity in the creative process.Understanding the dark side of creativity could help us to fully understand the creative process and to understand the inhibitory elements of creativity from the opposite side,so as to promote the innovative practices of organizations.Based on data collected from different types of enterprises distributed in cities among Central China,this dissertation explores the relationship between employee creativity and leader ostracism by adopting empirical research methods,which not only expands existing research on creativity,but also provides valuable managerial implications.Based upon the perspective of functional rationality,previous research has mainly focused on the antecedent variables of creativity.The research on the outcomes of creativity are relatively few,and they majorly adopt the intrapersonal approach to explore the relationship between creative actors and their health status or deviant behaviors.In contrast,there is a lack of research exploring how individual creativity triggers other subjects’ like leader’s cognitive and behavioral reactions.By adopting the perspective of organizational politics,Study One examines the impact of employee creativity on leader ostracism via the indirect effect of leader’s perceived threat,and the moderating role of employee political skills as well as its moderated mediation effect.Through the empirical analysis of the paired data of 199 leaders and employees,the results show that employee political skills significantly and negatively moderated the relationship between employee creativity and leader’s perceived threat;and leader’s perceived threat significantly predicted leader ostracism.In addition,individual political skills significantly moderated the indirect effect of individual creativity on leader ostracism via leader’s perceived threat,the higher the political skills of employees,the more significant of the indirect effect.Study One discusses the indirect effect of cognitive mechanism,and there exists mixed results regarding the effects of both cognitive and emotional mechanisms during the creative process.For one thing,scholars have found that emotional mechanisms could affect cognitive mechanisms,and the emotional ones have greater impact on employee creativity;For another,some scholars also find that cognitive mechanisms could affect emotional mechanisms,and the cognitive ones have greater impact on employee creativity.To address this inconsistency,based on the cognitive-experiential self-theory,Study Two explores the indirect effects of individual creativity and leader ostracism via both the cognitive mechanism of leader’s perceived threat and the emotional mechanism of leader’s envy,and discussed the relationship and difference between these two mechanisms,and the moderating role of leader’s desire for dominance as well as its moderated mediation effect.Through the empirical analysis of the paired data of 274 leaders and employees,the results show that leader’s desire for dominance had significantly and positively moderating effects on the relationship between employee creativity and leader’s perceived threat as well as the relationship between employee creativity and leader’s envy;both leader’s perceived threat and leader’s envy were significantly related with leader ostracism.Further,leader’s desire for dominance significantly moderated the indirect effect of individual creativity and leader ostracism via leader’s envy,the higher the desire for dominance of the leader,the more significant of the indirect effect.In addition,leader’s perceived threat significantly predicted leader’s envy,and the relationship between the interaction product of employee creativity and leader’s desire for dominance and leader ostracism was mediated by leader’s perceived threat and leader’s envy in series.The results of Study One and Study Two show that employee creativity could incur leader’s ostracism.Then,how would leader ostracism further affect employee creativity? Currently,few studies have examined the relationship between ostracism and creativity,and there exists mixed results.On the one hand,part of the research find that ostracism could negatively affect individuals’ creativity via cognitive or relational mechanisms;On the other hand,another stream of research finds that under certain circumstances,ostracism could enhance individuals’ creativity through the cognitive mechanisms.Meanwhile,there is a paucity of research examining the effect of emotional mechanisms on the link between ostracism and creativity.Thus,based on the functionalist perspective of emotions,Study Three examines the effect of leader ostracism on employee creativity,and explores the mediating mechanism of employee’s shame and the moderating effect of employee’s creative self-efficacy as well as its moderated mediation effect.The results of the empirical analysis of 312 pairs of leaders and employees suggest that: leader ostracism positively predicted individual’s shame;employee’s creative self-efficacy significantly moderated the link between employee’s shame and employee creativity,when employees had high creative self-efficacy,the relationship between employee’s shame and employee creativity would be more significant;and the moderated mediation effect of individual’s creative self-efficacy was also significant,the higher the creative self-efficacy of individuals,the more significant of the indirect effect.Finally,the dissertation summarizes the research findings of all the three sub-studies and puts forward the limitations and shortcomings of the dissertation,as well as the future research directions. |
