| Organizational innovation is critical for companies' survival and sustainable development,especially in this era of volatility,uncertainty,complexity and ambiguity(VUCA).Employee creativity,which involves the generation of useful and novel ideas,is the basis of organizational innovation.As organizations have increasingly moved to team-based work,team has become the basic unit in which an organization operates in today's knowledge-based economy.Accordingly,team creativity becomes another critical indicator for organizational development and success.How to motivate employees and their teams fight for creativity has become an issue with paramount importance for leaders and managers in this increasingly uncertain and dynamism business environment.Given the business value of employee and team creativity,many scholars have been dedicating to exploring its antecedents and the underlying mechanism through which they operate.Although employee creativity is the micro basis of team creativity,team creativity is not the same thing as the total of each team member's creativity;rather,team creativity might emerge synergistically when members interact in certain ways.In other words,team creativity is not only determined by individual creativity but also the team creativity-relevant processes.In a comprehensive review of extant creativity studies,I found the antecedents of individual creativity can be categorized into individual factors,task characteristics,and social situation factors,while antecedents of team creativity can be classified into team composition and structure,team process and team climate,and team leadership factors.Examining the drivers of employee and team creativity more closely,I uncover a key assumption regarding creativity in organizational life in prior creativity studies.It is assumed that following a consistent course of actions and/or relying on certain individual(e.g.,personality traits)and contextual characteristics(e.g.,task features)should enhance employee and team creativity over an extended period of time or within relatively familiar and stable task environments.However,the luxury of such enduring stability and certainty is lost in today's dynamic organizational environment where unexpected and unusual happenings occur frequently to disturb the routines that guide employees and team' behaviors.Defined as “[novel] occurrences that interrupt the routines of organizational life and prompt-controlled information processing”,workplace events' influences on work outcomes cannot be ignored.Examples of such unexpected events include sudden advancing of the deadline for work assignments,temporary adjustment of project requirements by customers,or employees suddenly quitting their jobs.These workplace events will interrupt standard routines and relatively stable workplace environment and require a more effortful and controlled response.Hence,we need to rethink about the how to improve employee and team creativity in such event context.Meanwhile,the occurrence of such discrete and unexpected events will disrupt pre-existing workplace routines and thus necessitate employees and teams to adjust or change previous work methods,processes,and procedures to respond given that the prevailing ones are not fitting.As a result,these events may serve as a motivating factor of employee and team creativity.Besides,by reviewing the abovementioned antecedents of creativity,we can also find that the previous studies have predominately focused on individual factors and relatively stable factors in work context,without pay attention to the role of workplace events.However,this deficient is problematic because some scholars have pointed out that discrete event is a very important component of work context and recall more event-oriented studies is needed to enrich our understanding about the role of events in organizational life.To fill the gap,this dissertation incorporate event into work context and investigate its impact on employee and team creativity in the workplace,thereby contributing to an in-depth understanding of the functioning of workplace events with respect to creativity.Event system theory is an emerging event-oriented theoretical perspective which can be utilized to account for how workplace events confronting employees impact individual or team creativity.Based on event system theory,event strength determines whether and how much influence events can have on entities' work outcomes,which is the main effects and core tenet of this theory.Event strength encompasses three main characteristics,which are event novelty,disruption,and criticality.In this dissertation,I draw on event system theory as the main theoretical framework to examine whether,how and when workplace events are related to employee and team creativity.Event system theory posits that events can arises at every hierarchical level and can have impact on entities within different levels,such as team level,individual level and among others.We should conduct multilevel event-oriented research to provide insights on how events impact team and individual creativity differentially.In addition,events can directly or indirectly impact creativity;or it can serve as contextual factors to influence the relationship between entity features or other continuous context factors and creativity;or even different subjects' perception around event strength can have congruence and asymmetric events on individual creativity.Further,event system theory focuses on the general impact events have on work outcomes.Yet there is an interpretative and psychological process that occurs between events and following outcomes.This theory does not cover this underlying mechanism and call on future studies to integrate other specific theories according to its research focus in order to unfold how events exerts its influence on entities.Last but not the least,event system theory suggests that “when examining events,scholars should not ignore the critical role of[one's internal] features but should construct an integrative theory-building approach that examines the ways features and events jointly or independently affect entities.This may enable the development of more fine-grained organizational theories,enhancing their explanatory power and impact”.Therefore,we also examine the interaction of external discrete events and internal stable features and their synergistic effects on creativity,which may be helpful to paint a complete picture about how the effects of event strength on employee and team creativity unfold.Taken together,this dissertation focuses on how workplace events impact individual and team creativity.In order to answer this research question thoroughly,this dissertation draw on event system theory as the main theoretical framework and combine the levels issues and the type of effects of event with an integrative theorybuilding approach.Specifically,we conduct three different but closely related studies with the aim to enrich our knowledge about the event-creativity linkage in the workplace.Below,I will introduce the primary content of each study:Study 1 is an individual-level study.This study aims to explore the contextual role of events in organizational life by examining whether and how workplace events impact the effects of employee perceived relatively stable organizational feature on employee creativity.Specifically,by integrating social exchange theory with event system theory,this study proposes the joint moderating effects of event strength on the indirect effects of perceived HRM strength on employee creativity via work engagement.A three-wave,multisource,and time-lagged survey of 220 employees and their 60 immediate supervisors from service industry was conducted to test the model.The multilevel path analyses results show that:(a)perceived HRM system strength is conducive to stimulating employee work engagement;(b)perceived HRM strength fosters employee creativity via work engagement;(c)the relationship between perceived HRM strength and work engagement is more salient when employees are facing with highly novel and critical event.Study 2 is a team-level study.This study aims to explore how and when events confronted by team members shape their creativity by examining the underlying mechanism and boundary condition between workplace events and team creativity.Specifically,by integrating team input-process-output framework with event system theory,this study focuses on one characteristic of workplace event and examines how and when workplace event novelty impact team creativity.This study employs a mixed method which combines qualitative case study and quantitative survey study.The case study was conducted in a large financial service firm in China.The three-wave,multisource,and time-lagged survey was conducted with 254 team members and their 65 immediate supervisors in a large manufacturing company.The data analyses results show that:(a)event novelty fosters team creativity through team improvisation;(b)event novelty fosters team creativity through team reflexivity;(c)the indirect effects between event novelty both team improvisation and team reflexivity are more salient when teams with a higher level of HR practice flexibility,such that teams with more flexible HR practices are more likely to adopt team improvisation and reflexivity to cope with workplace events with high novelty.Study 3 is located at leader-follower dyadic level.This study aims to explore how the fit/misfit of leader and follower event strength perception impacts follower creativity by adopting a relational perspective.Specifically,by integrating actionbased model of cognitive dissonance with event system theory,this study focuses on the congruence effects of leader and follower event criticality perception with regard to team development and success on follower creativity.A three-wave and time-lagged survey was conducted with 145 leader-follower-coworker triads in 12 large firms in China.The polynomial regression and response surface analyses results show that:(a)Misfit between leader and follower event criticality perception can serve as a motivation and stimulate followers' felt responsibility for constructive change;(b)Higher follower event criticality perception asymmetry has a stronger positive effect on follower's felt responsibility for constructive change as compared to higher leader event criticality perception symmetry;(c)Misfit between leader and follower event criticality perception has a positive indirect effect on follower creativity via follower's felt responsibility for constructive change and then taking charge behaviors.(d)The felt responsibility for constructive change from misfit will also increases follower perceived work stress and have a downstream effect on follower fatigue.By integrating event system theory into the creativity literature,this dissertation has conducted three complementary event-oriented studies to examine how workplace events impact creativity by employing a multilevel and multiple perspective investigation.To sum up,this study has the following six contributions and highlights:First,this dissertation enriches the knowledge about the antecedents of creativity by employing a new event-oriented perspective.Prior studies has predominately utilized a variance-or process-oriented perspective and focused on the impact of entities' internal features on creativity.By invoking an event-oriented perspective,this dissertation put emphasis on an important but underdeveloped contextual stimuli(i.e.,workplace events)and revealing how workplace events impact employee and team creativity.This endeavor is helpful for enrich our knowledge about the antecedents of creativity and our understanding about the event—creativity theoretical linkage.In addition,this endeavor also responded to event scholar's recent call for research to incorporate discrete events as context and fill in the deficit in extant contextual theorizing.Second,this dissertation enriches the knowledge about how event impact creativity in different levels in the organizations by utilizing a multilevel research design.We are in the initial stage of event oriented study and have little insights about the underlying mechanism between event and creativity.By drawing on event system theory as main theoretical framework,this dissertation conducted three complementary event-oriented studies to investigate the event—creativity theoretical linkages by employing a multi-level and multiple perspective investigation.Specifically,this dissertation firstly examined event's moderating effects in the individual level,then examined event's main effects in the team level,finally examined the congruence effects around event in the leader-follower dyadic level,which can provide more insights about differentiate paths of event—creativity.This research framework is helpful for painting a complete picture about how the effects of workplace events on employee creativity to unfold.Meanwhile,this dissertation integrated individual and team creativity and examined how events influence them through different mechanisms,which yields valuable insights about how events facilitate creativity in different levels.Third,this dissertation provides valuable insights about how workplace event influence creativity by drawing on different theoretical perspectives.Specifically,I integrate social exchange theory,team input-process-output theory and action-based cognitive dissonance theory with event system theory to examine how events influence creativity in different levels.This endeavor is helpful to uncovering different theoretical mechanisms underlying the impacts of workplace events on creativity and enrich our knowledge about event—creativity theoretical linkage.Fourth,this dissertation provided a more nuanced understanding of under which condition the effects of workplace events on creativity may be accentuated or attenuated.By echoing event scholar's recent call about employing an integrative theoretical approach to conduct event-oriented studies,I established two more finegrained theoretical models(i.e.,study 1 and study 2)by considering the integrative impact of discrete external events and continuous internal features on creativity.This integrative theoretical approach can provide deeper insights into which type of teams and organizations can effectively cope with unexpected workplace event and allow a more nuanced understanding of under which condition the effects of events may be accentuated in facilitating employee and team creativity.This event × feature approach also answered previous call about using “internal-external” and “personsituation” interactive perspective to examine organizational phenomenon..Last but not the least,this dissertation employs different research design and research methods in three sub-studies based on the nature of research question.Previous event literature are primarily qualitative studies including case studies and theoretical paper.This dissertation answered the call about more quantitative event research by introducing event strength and measuring it by Likert scales.This approach makes it possible to gauge the degree of changes in event strength will predict the variance in employee and team creativity.This dissertation utilized different statistical analytical approaches to investigate the impact of events on creativity,which is helpful for enrich our knowledge about the role of event in organizational life and provide some valuable avenues for future research.On the other hand,this dissertation has a relative strength in methodology.Specifically,study 1 employed a multi-source and multi-wave data collection from 220 employees in 60 teams to test the proposed model by utilizing hierarchical linear model(HLM).This research design and analytical approach is helpful for reducing common method biases and improving causality inference.Study 2 combined case study with multi-source and multi-wave survey from 220 employees in 65 teams in a large manufacturing company to test the hypothesized model.This research design is not only beneficial for capturing how team members cope with workplace events with highly novelty in real organizational life,but also can test the model with large sample and rigorous statistical analyses.Study 3 employed a multi-source and multiwave data collection from 145 focal employee-leader-coworker triads from 12 companies to test the model by utilizing response surface analyses.This analytical approach can reveal the complexities of different combinations of leader-follower event criticality perception on employee creativity.Further,multi-wave and multisource research design is also helpful for inferring causality and alleviating common method biases. |
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