Getting Creative With Resources: How Resilience, Task Interdependence, and Emotion Sharing Mitigate the Damage of Employee Role Ambiguity

Abstract

This article investigates how employees’ experience of role ambiguity might inhibit their creative behavior but also how this harmful effect might be buffered by employees’ access to relevant individual (resilience), job task (task interdependence), and relational (emotion sharing) resources. The uncertainty resulting from information deficiencies about job responsibilities diminishes in the presence of these resources, such that employees might be less likely to react to this resource-draining work condition by exhibiting a reluctance to develop change-invoking ideas for organizational improvement. Using survey data from employees in a large organization that operates in the renewable energy sector, this study shows that role ambiguity diminishes creative behavior, but this detrimental effect is subdued with higher levels of resilience, task interdependence, and emotion sharing. As this study shows, organizations that cannot avoid ambiguity in their employees’ work roles should adopt efforts to offset the associated challenge of thwarted creative behaviors with pertinent resources.