Role stressors, job satisfaction, and employee creativity: The cross-level moderating role of social media use within teams

Abstract

This study sheds light on how role stressors influence employee creativity by jointly exploring the mediating mechanism and contextual factors affecting these relationships. Drawing from the transactional theory of stress, we consider job satisfaction to be a mediator that represents employees’ attitudinal responses to stressors. We also consider social media use within teams to be a moderator that affects employees’ stress appraisal. Specifically, we distinguish between task- and relationship-oriented social media use. We propose a multilevel moderated mediation model to depict the nomological network. Results of a survey of 359 employees in 56 organizational teams suggest that two social media usage patterns differentially moderate the relationships between role stressors and job satisfaction as well as the indirect relationships between role stressors and employee creativity through job satisfaction. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications.