From Empowerment to Multilevel Creativity: The Role of Employee Self-Perceived Status and Feedback-Seeking Climate

Abstract

Employees' perception of their intrateam status plays an important role in the leader-member interaction process. Combining relational fairness theory and status theory, the present study reveals how leadership empowerment behavior (LEB) affects employee and team creativity. Specifically, we propose that LEB may increase employee creativity by elevating employee self-perceived status and enhance team creativity through fostering a feedback-seeking climate in the team. Moreover, we propose that, at the team level, team status conflict moderates the relationship between LEB and feedbackseeking climate such that LEB is only positively related to feedback-seeking climate when status conflict is low but not when it is high. We further propose that team feedback-seeking climate also mediates the interactive effect of LEB and status conflict on team creativity. Results based on data collected from a sample of 84 teams with 392 employees supported our hypotheses. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and propose future research directions.

Intrapreneurship in the digital era: driven by big data and human resource management?

“…Seibert et al (2004) stated that the practice of empowerment involves granting substantive decision-making powers to lower-level employees to perform work tasks and is manifested mainly as internal information sharing, work autonomy and responsibility. Scholars have revealed that stimulating employee creativity (Li et al, 2018), working ability (Eger et al, 2018) and innovative behavior (Liu et al, 2019) through empowerment is an effective means for enterprises to obtain response-ability and performance. However, several scholars have suggested that the effects of empowerment practice on employee behavior and organizational performance may not be as substantial as expected (Kaufman, 2015).…”

“…EHRM, including development opportunities, workplace participation, enriched job design, information sharing and work-time control opportunities, is an effective way of stimulating the internal organization vitality (Van De Voorde et al, 2016). Scholars have revealed that EHRM could foster employee work engagement and innovative behavior (Liu et al, 2019), creativity (Li et al, 2018) and working ability (Eger et al, 2018), which were believed as positive factors improving firm performance (Gong et al, 2013). Other studies also gave a direct relationship between EHRM and firm performance.…”

“…These studies show how big data affect enterprises' performance from the perspective of dynamic capabilities. Scholars also point out that EHRM could effectively promote employees' innovative behavior (Liu et al, 2019), working ability (Eger et al, 2018) and creativity (Li et al, 2018), which could also have a positive effect on enterprise performance. It is not difficult to see that these studies have not explored from the micro perspective of employees' entrepreneurial behavior within the organization, which is the focus of our research.…”

Creativity and paternalistic leadership in a developing country's restaurants: The role of job embeddedness and career stage

“…According to Li et al (2018), creativity has an important role in tourism businesses; thus, leaders often seek to enhance it. Creativity can be defined as individuals' ability to create new ideas regarding products, services, and procedures (Roopak et al, 2019), which is the applied definition in this research.…”

“…Although there has been a large number of studies that examine the antecedents of creativity (Cheung & Wong, 2011; Dedahanov et al, 2016; Li et al, 2018); there is a paucity of research on the impact of the job embeddedness on creativity (Afsar & Badir, 2016; Karatepe, 2016). Therefore, this study aims to contribute to the study of job embeddedness on creativity in the tourism and hospitality industry through the lens of paternalistic leadership.…”