Enhancing employee creativity: Effects of choice, rewards and personality.

We conducted a quasi-experimental field study of an organization-wide suggestion program and a follow-up laboratory experiment to examine the effects of choice of rewards on employee creativity. As hypothesized, the results of both studies showed that choice had positive, significant effects on the number of creative ideas employees generated and the creativity level of those ideas. Results of the quasi-experiment also showed that creative self-efficacy (CSE) mediated the effects of reward choice. Two general categories of rewards were examined in our studies-those that directly benefited the idea generator (Self) and those that directly benefited charities (Other). We explored the effects of these reward categories on employee creativity and whether employee creative personality interacted with the reward categories to affect employee creativity. Results showed that the reward categories did not have a significant impact on employee creativity. However, both studies demonstrated that in the Other reward condition, employees with a creative personality produced ideas higher in creativity than those with a less creative personality. The quasi-experiment also showed that CSE mediated the effects of the Reward × Creative Personality interaction. We discussed the implications of these results for the future research and practice. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Hot shots and cool reception? An expanded view of social consequences for high performers.

While high performers contribute substantially to their workgroups and organizations, research has indicated that they incur social costs from peers. Drawing from theories of social comparison and conservation of resources, we advance a rational perspective to explain why high performers draw both intentional positive and negative reactions from peers and consider how cooperative work contexts moderate these effects. A multisource field study of 936 relationships among 350 stylists within 105 salons offered support for our model and an experiment with 204 management students constructively replicated our findings and ruled out alternative explanations. Results indicated that peers offered more support and also perpetrated more undermining to high performers. Paradoxical cognitive processes partly explain these behaviors, and cooperative contexts proved socially disadvantageous for high performers. Findings offer a more comprehensive view of the social consequences of high performance and highlight how peer behaviors toward high performers may be calculated and strategic rather than simply reactionary. (PsycINFO Database Record

Fostering employee service creativity: Joint effects of customer empowering behaviors and supervisory empowering leadership.

Integrating insights from the literature on customers' central role in service and the literature on employee creativity, we offer theoretical and empirical account of how and when customer empowering behaviors can motivate employee creativity during service encounters and, subsequently, influence customer satisfaction with service experience. Using multilevel, multisource, experience sampling data from 380 hairstylists matched with 3550 customers in 118 hair salons, we found that customer empowering behaviors were positively related to employee creativity and subsequent customer satisfaction via employee state promotion focus. Results also showed that empowering behaviors from different agents function synergistically in shaping employee creativity: supervisory empowering leadership strengthened the indirect effect of customer empowering behaviors on employee creativity via state promotion focus.

Transforming service employees and climate: a multilevel, multisource examination of transformational leadership in building long-term service relationships.

This longitudinal field study integrates the theories of transformational leadership (TFL) and relationship marketing to examine how TFL influences employee service performance and customer relationship outcomes by transforming both (at the micro level) the service employees' attitudes and (at the macro level) the work unit's service climate. Results revealed that, at the individual level, managers' TFL was positively related to employee service performance, which, in turn, positively predicted customers' expressed intention to maintain a long-term service relationship with the service employee and manager-reported number of the employee's long-term customers measured 9 months later. In addition, the relationship between TFL and employee service performance was partially mediated by employee self-efficacy. Furthermore, store-level TFL was positively associated with store-level service climate, and service climate further enhanced the relationship between individual-level TFL and employee service performance.