Bringing out the creativity in you: How a competitive climate and mentoring kindle creative work involvement of university academic staff

Abstract

We investigated mentoring as a moderator between competitive climate and employee creative work involvement. Participants were 270 academic staff of a Nigerian federal university (male = 155 [57.41%] and female = 115 [42.59%]). The participants were employed as Graduate Assistant = 15 (5.56%), Assistant Lecturer = 78 (28.89%), Lecturer II = 61 (22.59%), and Lecturer I = 116 (42.96%). The participants responded to surveys on competitive climate, mentoring, creative work involvement, and their demographic information. We tested three hypotheses on the relationship between competitive climate and creative work involvement, mentoring and creative work involvement, and the moderating role of mentoring between competitive climate and creative work involvement using hierarchical multiple regression. The results showed that competitive climate positively and significantly predicted creative work involvement. Mentoring had a significant positive predictive relationship with creative work involvement, and moderated the relationship between competitive climate and creative work involvement such that competitive climate becomes more effective in increasing creative work involvement as employees experience decreasing levels of mentoring. The findings imply that designing an academic work environment to be competitive and encouraging mentoring relationships between mentors and protégés are likely to spur creativity in the work setting.