Be in Your Element: The Joint Effect of Human Resource Management Strength and Proactive Personality on Employee Creativity

Abstract

Employee creativity is fast becoming a part and parcel in the wake of the increasing volatility of the employment market and the complexity of job demands. Drawing from the actor-context interactionist theoretical approach and career construction theory, this paper adds to current research by exploring the serial mediating effect of job crafting (JC) and career adaptability (CA) in the impact of human resource management strength (HRMS) on employee creativity. Furthermore, we suggest that proactive personality interacts with HRMS to jointly influence creativity. Survey data from samples of 297 (Study 1) and 390 (Study 2) employees largely confirm our model. Our findings show that HRMS positively impacts employee creativity via serial mediation of job crafting and career adaptability, and proactive personality negatively moderates the process. The paper confirms and expands the interactionist theoretical perspective of creativity, highlights the significance of integration of contextual factors, individual characteristics, and career construction, and makes certain practical sense.

The role of synergistic interplay among proactive personality, leader creativity expectations, and role clarity in stimulating employee creativity

“…We identified a significant positive role of synergistic interplay among proactive personality, leader creativity expectations, and role clarity in stimulating employee creativity, which may enrich relevant research on the Pygmalion effect of creativity. Previous studies have shown that proactive personality can perform as a key antecedent variable for employee creativity (Tai and Mai, 2016;Kim, 2019;Wang et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022), and this study further confirms the relationship between proactive personality and employee creativity. This result may be due to the great emphasis that Confucian societies place collectivism.…”

“…Academics broadly define "creativity" as "the ability to produce innovative and practical ideas" (Amabile, 1988). Factors influencing creativity in this context include organizational culture, job design, leadership, human resource management, and personality characteristics (Gong et al, 2009;Zhang et al, 2020Zhang et al, , 2022. Individual factors are generally regarded as the main source of employee creativity (Shalley et al, 2004), particularly personality characteristics that may be deep, intrinsic motivations for creative work (Zhang et al, 2019).…”

Impacts of Procedural Justice and Ethical Leadership on Organizational Innovation

“…To our knowledge, these indirect effects have yet to be examined in organizational innovation. Further, a proactive personality as an aspiring individual personality is usually linked with employee creative performance (Li et al, 2020;Maria et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022). Chaubey and Sahoo (2021) argued that proactive employees demonstrate a high level of creativity.…”

Impact of Career Adaptability on Employee Performance: The Moderating Role of HR Practices

“…Previous research has suggested that CA is related to HRM through different mechanisms (Zhang et al, 2022). The present research pays attention to the mediating effect of OC and the moderating impact of HR practices.…”