Abstract
With today’s increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment, creativity is critical for enterprises to enhance their competitiveness. Companies today invest and seek new ways to enhance creativity of employees within the organization. Our study describes the effects of servant leadership, psychological safety, and employee well-being on creativity under the conservation of resources theory. We used a sample of 252 full-time employees in the United Kingdom who had been recruited online and collected their data for analysis. We conducted confirmatory factor analyses to test the validity of the measurement model and regression to evaluate the direct effects. Subsequently, we used bootstrapping to confirm mediation and serial mediation effects. The results showed that servant leadership was positively related to creativity and that psychological safety and employee well-being were serial mediators between them.
Highlights
Today, with the broadening of globalization and information technology and the rapid technological developments, there is competition for organizations’ focus among information, knowledge, and creativity
We extend the work on COR theory following He et al.’s (2020) application of the theory to explain the relationship between compulsory citizenship behavior and employee creativity and Braun and Peus’s (2018) use of it to explain the relationship between authentic leadership and followers’ job satisfaction
In the relationship between servant leadership and employee creativity, we introduced the sequential mediators of psychological safety in the workplace and employee well-being: Considering psychological safety a psychological resource, we applied COR theory and used a serial mediation model to explain how servant leadership increases the sense of psychological safety, which enhances employee well-being and promotes employee creativity
Summary
With the broadening of globalization and information technology and the rapid technological developments, there is competition for organizations’ focus among information, knowledge, and creativity. Today’s organizations are operating in an unstable business environment that requires greater effort to achieve organizational innovation (Tierney and Farmer, 2011). Most of the previous studies focused on organizational innovation, and research on employee creativity has remained in its early stages until recently; in the new century, employee creativity began to receive increasing attention (Tierney and Farmer, 2011). As the main body of enterprise innovation, employee creativity can effectively promote enterprise development, and because creativity promotes innovation, growth, and competitiveness (Gong et al, 2013), most organizations invest heavily in finding effective ways to encourage employee creativity (Liu et al, 2012)
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