A Study On The Influencing Mechanism Of Core Self-evaluation On Employee Creativity

When employees exhibit creativity at work,they bring forward novel,potentially useful ideas about organizational products,practices,services or procedures.There are a large number of researches,especially within the fields of creativity and individual characteristics,highlighting the impact of individual differences on employee creativity such as personality,cognitive style,and knowledge.Simultaneously,researchers find that a stable set of core personal features,such as autonomy,intuition and selfconfidence,related to employee creativity across a variety of domains.In this way,a growing number of studies have examined the links between personal traits and employee creativity.Nevertheless,as an important individual trait and enduring assessment of one's own worth and competence,core self-evaluation has attracted little attention concerning its impact on employee creativity.Drawing from the approach/avoidance framework and the componential theory of creativity,we argued that researchers should explore the following questions remain unanswered:(1)Does core self-evaluation influence different types of employee creativity? And(2)Is the effect of core self-evaluation on employee creativity mediated by any other variables? With this argument,we examined the distinct mechanisms simultaneously and independently occurring between core self-evaluation and radical and incremental creativity via individual intellectual capital,namely individual human capital,individual structural capital and individual relational capital,as well as the moderating role of goal orientation—learning goal orientation,performance-prove goal orientation and performance-avoid goal orientation.We have conducted two rounds of survey for this study.The first round of survey is a pilot study,aiming to verify the validity and reliability of individual intellectual capital scale.We administered our questionnaire to 284 MBA students.After analyzing the survey data by Q-sort and exploratory structural equation modeling,we further revised the questionnaire.Next,to test our hypotheses,we conducted a second-round survey on a sample of employees and their direct supervisors from 129 companies and 614 usable dyads were collected,which are in industries such as information technology,insurance,manufacturing and banking.Structural equation modeling and Johnson-Neyman simple slope method were employed to test the research model.In line with theoretical arguments,empirical results have showed that:(1)Core selfevaluation exerts more direct influences on incremental than on radical creativity;(2)Core self-evaluation has significant positive affects all three components of individual intellectual capital;(3)Individual human capital,individual structural capital and individual relational capital have significant positive influences on radical and incremental creativity;(4)Individual human capital,individual structural capital and individual relational capital play full mediation roles between core self-evaluation and radical/incremental creativity;(5)Learning goal orientation respectively moderate the positive impacts of individual human capital and individual structural capital;(6)Performance-avoid goal orientation respectively moderate the positive impacts of individual structural capital and individual relational capital;(7)The moderating effect of learning goal orientation/performance-avoid goal orientation will in several lead to employee creativity through the mediation of individual relational capital.With these findings,we make several contributions to the literature practice.First,we addressed the question whether core self-evaluation could simultaneously cause radical and ncremental creativity.Second,we identified the mediational effects of individual intellectual capital,between core self-evaluation and employee creativity.Thirdly,this study explored how individual intellectual capital,mediates the moderating the effect of goal orientation,helping our better understanding of the formation mechanism of employee creativity in target motivation situations.Managerial implications,research limitations and suggestions for future studies are also discussed.