Team Structure Constraints And Employee Creativity:A Cross-Level Mediating Role Of Work Passion

As the Chinese economy moves from high-speed growth to new normal,competition among enterprises becomes fiercer.The ability to foster innovation is the key to a timely response to a rapid changing of external environment.To this end,it is vital to cultivate employee creativity.The mainstream view is that a positive corporate environment will promote the improvement of employee creativity,and a negative corporate atmosphere will inhibit the development of employee creativity.However,many management practices have shown that the constraints in the enterprise have not weakened employee creativity,but instead have had a positive effect.More and more scholars have studied the relationship between corporate constraints and employee creativity on the basis of management practice,but these studies were not in-depth,and didn't give a clear answer about the specific path of corporate constraints affecting employee creativity.Some scholars have discussed the relationship between organizational structure constraints and organizational innovation as well as that between organizational structure constraints and R&D team knowledge absorptive capacity.Therefore,this study will attempt to have a further study about the relationship between team structure constraints and employee creativity.Some studies have confirmed the mediating role of intrinsic motivation which is close to harmonious work passion in the team-to-individual path.Obsessive work passion is another dimension of dualistic work passion.Therefore,this study will explore the role of work passion in the relationship between team structure constraints and employee creativity.Self-determination theory is a classic motivation theory in management science.It not only divides and expresses individual motivation in detail,but also clearly expresses the transformation process of individual motivation.Role stress theory focuses on the dilemma individual faces when he or she plays a role in the workplace.Based on self-determination theory and role stress theory,this study collected the data of 29 companies through the use of literature research methods and questionnaires methods.After team leaders and team members were paired,88 valid questionnaires of team leaders and 654 valid questionnaires of team members were obtained.This study finally got the following specific conclusions after using statistical analysis methods:(1)team centralization promotes employee creativity;(2)team formalization promotes employee creativity;(3)team centralization has a positive impact on employee harmonious work passion;(4)team formalization has a positive impact on employee harmonious work passion,and has a negative impact on employee obsessive work passion;(5)harmonious work passion has a significant mediating effect on promotion relationship of team centralization and employee creativity,and has a partial mediating effect on promotion relationship of team formalization and employee creativity;(6)obsessive work passion has a partial mediating effect on promotion relationship of team formalization and employee creativity.Conclusions of this study have important implications for companies to enhance employee creativity.For theory,this study enriches the sources of employee creativity and further extends the application of self-determination theory.For management practice,the conclusion that team structure constraints promote employee creativity provides bases for managers to establish more creative teams;the specific conclusions of the relationship between team structure constraints and work passion provide references that managers can effectively control work passion in the team;the conclusions that the cross-level mediating effect of work passion has been verified also provide possible enlightenments for managers to better predict employee creativity and build innovative teams in practice.