Bolstering creativity willingness through digital task interdependence, disruptive and smart HRM technologies

Abstract

To sustain competitive advantage, employees must be willing to generate and pursue creative ideas. Sustaining competitive advantage in this way, can put organizational leaders under pressure to ensure smart human resource management technology (SHRMT) is effectively used to drive the exchange of creative ideas in work teams. Though collective creative idea generation could increase task interdependence between teams, we argue that this does not sufficiently guarantee “willingness” to exert increased creative behaviour, especially under disruptive technological conditions. Our study employed a cross-sectional (time lag) survey design with 396 respondents from 56 manufacturing organisations in Nigeria. We utilised partial least squares path modelling for data analysis. We investigate how digital task interdependence, disruptive technology and SHRMT act to predict team creativity willingness. Our findings indicate that digital task interdependence, disruptive technology and SHRMT have direct positive effects on team creativity willingness, while disruptive technology attenuates SHRMT’s positive effect on team creativity willingness. Nevertheless, digital task interdependence dampens disruptive technology’s positive effect on team creativity willingness. Considering the volatility of today’s disruptive technology impacts, and by leveraging SHRMT and digital task interdependence tenets, practitioners may be able to better bolster team creativity willingness to sustain competitive advantage.