What Do We Still Need to Know about Employee Creativity: A fsQCA Approach

Abstract

This study explored employees behavior flexibility, status, and independence value as vital factors of employee creativity. Based on the theory of interaction creativity, we theorize the core factors, synergistic effects, and substitution effects of employee creativity. This paper adopted a qualitative approach using a self-administrated survey to collect data. Data were collected from 380 Chinese employees via an online and offline survey. The results contribute to creativity literature and expand the study on employee’s creativity performance. Moreover, it opens the black box of employee creativity from a new insight by exploring the effects of human resource flexibility and work values. The paper suggests that to obtain innovation and organizational sustainability, companies should not only advocate human resource flexibility management but also combine the work values of employees.

The Values Supporting the Creativity of Employees

“…Inefficient use of employee talent (Gottwald et al, 2015) is considered a waste of resources that leads to a lack of creativity, reduced market share, competitive advantage (Milenković et al, 2015;Dobrodolac et al, 2016), and reduced customer satisfaction (Khalil et al, 2017). The successful sustainable development of the company includes the synergy of quality management (Nedeliakova et al, 2016), technology, and well-motivated employees (Hitka et al, 2019), whose common basis are shared and applied corporate values (Lorincová et al, 2018;Song et al, 2020).…”