Dual Effects of Job Complexity on Proactive and Responsive Creativity: Moderating Role of Employee Ambiguity Tolerance
Abstract
Departing from existing studies based on general notion of creativity, we highlight the driver or initiating force behind creative engagement in organizations. To this end, we distinguish between proactive and responsive creativity and provide a nuanced perspective on the processes underlying distinct types of employee creativity. We propose that job complexity indirectly affects proactive and responsive creativity of employees by promoting psychological empowerment and cognitive overload, respectively. The ambiguity tolerance of employees is hypothesized to moderate the indirect effects of job complexity on the two types of creativity. Data collected from 143 employee–supervisor dyads in various companies in Sweden and Korea supported most of our hypotheses. For employees with high ambiguity tolerance, job complexity exhibited a significant indirect effect on proactive creativity through psychological empowerment. For employees with low ambiguity tolerance, job complexity exerted a significant indirect effect on responsive creativity via cognitive overload. By revealing distinct psychological paths toward different types of creativity and identifying a boundary condition for such processes, the present study provides an ecologically valid explanation regarding creativity in organizations.
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Biographies
Sun Young Sung is assistant professor at Nanjing University, China. She earned her PhD in international business from Seoul National University, South Korea. Her research interests include knowledge management in teams and organizations, organizational demography, and innovative performance at multiple levels of analysis.
Andreas Antefelt is a human resource manager at Samsung Electronics, Korea. He earned his master’s degree in organizational behavior from Seoul National University.
Jin Nam Choi is professor of management at Seoul National University, South Korea. He earned his PhD in organizational psychology from the University of Michigan. His research interests include innovation implementation, organizational creativity, and multilevel processes of human behavior in organizations.
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Article first published online: December 8, 2015
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