Abusive supervision and employee creativity

Abstract

Purpose – Prior researches have indicated that leadership had an important impact on employee creativity. However, the authors know little about the link between the dark side of leadership-abusive supervision, and employee creativity, as well as its underlying mechanisms. Combining psychological safety theory and social identification theory, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity and the mediating role of psychological safety and organizational identification between abusive supervision and employee creativity. Design/methodology/approach – The authors conducted a multi-source and time-lagged data collection. At Time 1, team members evaluated abusive supervision and psychological safety, and at Time 2, team members evaluated organization identification, and team leaders evaluated members’ creativity. Abusive supervision, psychological safety were evaluated at first stage and organizational identification, creativity were evaluated at second stage, being conducted 2-4 weeks later after the first stage. Finally 423 participants completed two waves of data collection. Findings – The results suggested that, abusive supervision had negative effects on psychological safety and organizational identification, and psychological safety partially mediated the relationship between abusive supervision and organizational identification, and organizational identification fully mediated the relationship between psychological safety and creativity, and the negative effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity was mediated by psychological safety and then by organizational identification. Originality/value – This study identifies and examines the mechanism underlying the effect of abusive supervision, and suggests that psychological safety and organizational identification are two important mediators of the complex relationship between abusive supervision and employee creativity. Therefore, this study not only re-examines the inconsistent effect of abusive supervision on employee creativity, but also represents the first attempt at integrating the psychological safety perspective and social identification theory to study employee creativity and offers important implications for theory development.

Humble Leadership, Psychological Safety, Knowledge Sharing, and Follower Creativity: A Cross-Level Investigation

“…Research on the relationship between psychological safety and creativity has yielded mixed findings (Liu et al, 2016), which indicates that although psychological safety has often been identified as a predictor of creativity, it also interacts with other variables to alter predicted relationships (Edmondson and Lei, 2014). However, research on the boundary conditions associated with the influence of psychological safety remains underdeveloped (Edmondson and Lei, 2014).…”

“…Although most research has indicated the mediating role of psychological safety in the relationship between leadership or behaviors and follower creativity (e.g., Carmeli et al, 2010), Li et al (2015) found no evidence for such a mediation process. Some scholars have built a sequential mediational model to account for the inconsistent findings in the literature (e.g., Liu et al, 2016; Gonçalves and Brandão, 2017). For example, Gonçalves and Brandão (2017) found that psychological safety mediates the relationship between humble leadership and psychological capital, which is then positively related to team creativity.…”

“…However, research on the relationship between psychological safety and creativity has yielded mixed findings (Liu et al, 2016). Some studies suggest that psychological safety does not necessarily lead to creativity (e.g., Li et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2016). Therefore, the relationship described above is apparently more complex than we might expect (Liu et al, 2016).…”

“…Some studies suggest that psychological safety does not necessarily lead to creativity (e.g., Li et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2016). Therefore, the relationship described above is apparently more complex than we might expect (Liu et al, 2016). The mixed empirical findings imply the existence of boundary conditions that enable or hinder the positive influence of psychological safety on creativity.…”

The Mediating Role of Organizational Identification in the Relationship between Quality of Work Life and Organizational Agility: A Study on Menoufia University Hospitals

“…Another study showed that OI significantly affects the relationship between mental integrity and organizational creativity (Liu et al, 2016). One of the studies has shown that customer orientation is a mediating variable in linking OI and job performance (He et al, 2015).…”