Pressure to be creative: How employees respond to organizational creativity pressure

• Main Author: EUN, Hye Jung
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2021
• Subjects: Creativity; Innovation; Workplace stressor; Pressure; Engagement; Gender; Uncertainty; Fairness; Organizational Behavior and Theory; Organization Development
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/351; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1342&context=etd_coll
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Creativity and innovation are vital for organizational growth and success, driving many organizations to increase pressure for employee creativity. Yet, researchers have neglected investigating how employees respond to creativity pressure at the workplace. This dissertation introduces and develops a new scale for the concept of organizational creativity pressure – the pressure on employees to continually develop novel and useful ideas and solutions. The scale is further validated through extensive assessment of content and construct validity, empirically differentiating the construct from similar others such as performance pressure and support for creativity. Drawing on the transactional theory of stress (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) and the need-based theory of work motivation (Green, Finkel, Fitzsimons, & Gino, 2017), I theorize that organizational creativity pressure is appraised more strongly as a challenge stressor than a hindrance stressor, in turn promoting work engagement in employees. Building on the emerging research on gender and creativity, I further theorize that the positive effects of organizational creativity pressure on challenge appraisal and work engagement are stronger for men than for women. Four studies provide evidence consistent with the model. Interestingly, the pattern of interaction is such that men are significantly less motivated and engaged than women at low organizational creativity pressure. At high organizational creativity pressure, there is no significant gender difference in work engagement. Women are also not more likely to see organizational creativity pressure as a hindrance stressor compared to men. This essay has important theoretical contributions to research in creativity, gender, and workplace stress. In a separate chapter, I investigate whether organizational creativity pressure induces feeling of task uncertainty among employees, which in turn leads to negative perception of fairness in the workplace. In sum, this dissertation draws attention to the new construct and the related workplace phenomenon, develops a scale to provide a foundation for empirically rigorous research and investigates both positive and negative effects of organizational creativity pressure in the workplace.