Driving Forces of Employee Creativity in the Chinese Innovative Organizations: The Role of Organization Support and Calling

Recently, China is establishing innovation-oriented country and innovative enterprises, and vigorously supporting the organization innovation to cultivate an innovation-driven economy. At the same time, the spirit of the craftsman which is rooted in vocation calling is advocated to promote the development of Chinese independent innovation. The feasibility of this innovative strategy has become the focus of the study.

According to the social exchange theory, when employees perceive the organization support, they will have their own sense of obligation to the organization, subsequently they make the commitment to work and are engaged in accomplishing organizational goals actively. That means the organization support has a role of emotional arousal. In other words, it can arouse vocation calling which proved to be relevant to many positive outcomes in the working context. Componential model of creativity considers that the impacts of social environments on the individual creativity are mainly mediated by task motivation. Thus it can be inferred that organization support as an environmental factor will influence employee creativity through calling.

On the basis of the theories and literature review, a mediation model was constructed among organization support, vocation calling and creativity.

The model was investigated using a sample of 298 employees from Chinese innovative organizations using Survey of Perceived Organizational Support-8, Calling and Vocation Questionnaire and Person-Environment Fit Scale for Creativity.

Correlation and regression were adopted to analyze whether the external force (organization support) and the internal force (calling) are driving forces of employee creativity. The findings revealed that positive and significant correlations were observed among perceived organizational support, calling and creativity. Perceived organizational support and calling were statistically significant predictors of employee creativity. Analysis of mediating effect indicated the mediating role of calling between perceived organizational support with creativity, which showed the influence mechanism on employee creativity.