Crafting job demands and employee creativity: A diary study

• Published date: 01 November 2020
• Author: Jinlong Zhu,Nan Wang,Shuhua Sun,Zhaoli Song
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22013
• Date: 01 November 2020

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Crafting job demands and employee creativity: A diary study

Shuhua Sun

1

| Nan Wang

2

| Jinlong Zhu

3

| Zhaoli Song

4

1

A. B. Freeman School of Business, Tulane

University, New Orleans, Louisiana

2

Department of Management, Lingnan

University, Tuen Mun, Hong Kong

3

School of Business, Renmin University of

China, Beijing, China

4

Department of Management & Organization,

National University of Singapore, Singapore

Correspondence

Shuhua Sun, A. B. Freeman School of Business,

Tulane University, 7 McAlister Drive, GWBC

652, New Orleans, LA 70118.

Email: ssun7@tulane.edu

Funding information

Singapore Ministry of Education ACRF grant,

Grant/Award Number: R-317-000-129-115;

Social Science Research Thematic Grant,

Grant/Award Number: R-311-000-029-119; A.

B. Freeman School of Business: Lepage Faculty

Fellowship

Abstract

People are more creative on some days thanothers. Studying how individualsgenerate

creative ideas from day to day could contribute to knowledge regarding the causes of

such within-person variations and have practical implications for improving employee

creativity across time. By adopting a dynamic resource allocation perspective and a

repeated-measure diary design,we developed and examined a theoretical model focus-

ing on the within-person processes of employee creativity. Specifically, we hypothe-

sized that momentary role-breadth self-efficacy predicts daily changes in increasing job

challenges, which, in turn, predicts daily changes in employee creativity, and that the

latter relationship is accentuated by decreasing hindering demands. Results, based on

818 pairs of matched morning–afternoon observa tions from 91 employees o ver

10 workdays, provided support for our predictions. We discuss the theoretical and

practical implications of these resultsfor improving employee daily creativity.

KEYWORDS

employee creativity, job crafting, role-breadth self-efficacy, within-person

1|CRAFTING JOB DEMANDS AND

EMPLOYEE CREATIVITY: A DIARY STUDY

Employee creativity involves the generation of novel and potentially

useful ideas regarding organizational products, practices, services, or

procedures (Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004). It provides the founda-

tion for organizational innovation and contributes to organizational

competitiveness (Anderson, Potocˇnik, & Zhou, 2014; Gong, Zhou, &

Chang, 2013). Consequently, employee creativity has received exten-

sive scholarly attention (Amabile, 1996; Ford, 1996; Montag,

Maertz, & Baer, 2012; Unsworth, 2001; Woodman, Sawyer, &

Griffin, 1993). To date, empirical research has significantly advanced

our understanding of who are more likely to be creative (Hunter,

Cushenbery, & Friedrich, 2012) and when and why they are more cre-

ative (Liu, Jiang, Shalley, Keem, & Zhou, 2016; Zhou & Hoever, 2014).

However, most existing studies focused on between-person compari-

sons of employee creativity but paid sparse attention to within-person

fluctuations in creativity across time (for review, see Steele, 2020). An

understanding of the within-person process, however, is extremely

important from both practical and theoretical perspectives as follows:

knowing how individuals generate creative ideas on a daily basis could

aid in the development of integrative models of employee creativity

(to complement existing between-person research) and have practical

implications for improving employee creativity over time. Indeed,

many human resource management (HRM) practices seek to improve

employees' creativity across time (i.e., within-person changes) instead

of seeking to make some employees more creative than others.

Furthermore, between-person studies have inherent limitations, war-

ranting within-person investigations. First, between-person studies can

only explain between-person variations in creativity, leaving within-person

variations in creativity unexplained. Several recent studies, however, have

reported considerable within-person variations in employee creativity

(Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005; Niks, De Jonge, Gevers, &

Houtman, 2017; Ohly & Fritz, 2010; Petrou, Bakker, & Bezemer, 2019).

Second and more important, between-person research findings cannot be

automatically generalized to within-person levels (McCormick, Reeves,

Downes, Li, & Ilies, 2020) because such generalizations across levels are

prone to ecological fallacy (Curran & Bauer, 2011).

Therefore, the purpose of this study is to contribute to knowl-

edge regarding within-person changes in employee creativity. Specifi-

cally, we draw upon recent advancements in the job design literature

to examine whetherand how employees' daily job crafting affects their

Shuhua Sun and Nan Wang contributed equally to this study.

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.22013

Hum Resour Manage. 2020;59:569–583. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC. 569