An Investigation Of The Influence Workplace Visibility On Employee Creativity And Its Mechanisms

More and more organizations adopt an open-workplace design and advocate employee creativity.Nevertheless,few research has discussed how to encourage employee creativity in an open-workplace design.Visibility,the degree to which employees have the visual access to other organizational members without leaving their seats,is an important feature of the open workplace.As workplace context plays a crucial role in affecting employees’ engagement in creativity,it is necessary to examine how and when visibility would affect their creativity.Based on the ability-motivation-opportunity theory and environmental psychology literature,we contend that visibility would promote employees’ informal learning(i.e.,ability)and prosocial motivation(i.e.,motivation),and subsequently increase their creativity.Further,we propose that visibility is more likely to promote employees’ creativity via informal learning when these employees possess high(rather than low)prosocial motivation,or when their leaders encourage high(rather than low)creativity(i.e.,opportunity).Further,we propose a three-way interactive effect of leader encouragement of creativity,prosocial motivation and informal learning on the indirect relationship between visibility and employee creativity.This dissertation conducted two studies to examine the hypotheses mentioned above.In study1,we conducted a scenario experiment among 183 employees from various industries to examine the effect of visibility on informal learning and prosocial motivation.In study 2,we conducted a two-wave field survey among 215 service employees to examine our whole model.Using SPSS25.0 and the PROCESS macro 3.3 to analyze our data,the following results are found:First,visibility is positively related to informal learning and prosocial motivation;Informal learning and prosocial motivation respectively mediate the positive relationship between visibility and employee creativity;Second,prosocial motivation positively moderates the indirect relationship between visibility and employee creativity via informal learning;Third,leader encouragement of creativity positively moderates the indirect relationship between visibility and creativity via informal learning;Fourth,leader encouragement of creativity positively moderates the indirect relationship between visibility and creativity via prosocial motivation.Fifth,the three-way interactive effect of leader encouragement of creativity,prosocial motivation and informal learning on the indirect relationship between visibility and employee creativity was not found.Theoretically,findings of this dissertation enrich the creativity research by considering physical environment as an antecedent of employee creativity and revealing the surrounding mechanisms.Practically,our findings provide important implications for managers to further realize employees’ creative potential through informal learning,prosocial motivation,and leader behavior in an open workplace of high visibility.