Experienced high performance work system, extroversion personality, and creativity performance

Abstract

High performance work system refers to a set of coherent human resource management practices that a company can implement in order to achieve better performance. Based on the high performance work system literature, we propose that experienced high performance work systems will prompt workers to exchange job- related information with colleagues. Moreover, we draw on the trait activation theory to propose that an extroversion personality may strengthen the effect of experienced high performance work systems on information exchange. The resulting enhanced level of information exchange, in turn, may improve workers’ creativity performance. Analyzing time-lagged data collected from different sources among Taiwanese research and development engineers, we find support for the proposed relationships. As previous authors found that human resource management practices may stimulate creativity through psychological empowerment, our study identifies yet another path through which human resource practices may provoke creativity. We also demonstrate that different workers will react differently with the same levels of experienced human resource practices.