Idiosyncratic deals and employee creativity: The mediating role of creative self‐efficacy

• Date: 01 November 2018
• Author: Yi Liu,Shuhong Wang,Christina E. Shalley
• Published date: 01 November 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21917

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Idiosyncratic deals and employee creativity: The mediating

role of creative self-efficacy

Shuhong Wang

1

| Yi Liu

2

| Christina E. Shalley

3

1

Department of Management, College of

Business and Economics, Radford University,

Radford, Virginia

2

School of Business, Trinity University, San

Antonio, Texas

3

Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute

of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

Correspondence

Shuhong Wang, Department of Management,

College of Business and Economics, Radford

University, Radford, VA 24141.

Email: shuwang@radford.edu

Idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) have become an increasingly popular human resource management

practice to attract, retain, and motivate employees. This is particularly true for those employees

whose jobs require some level of creativity, as these types of jobs are often the ones that allow

for or benefit most from these customized work arrangements. Using social cognitive theory

that focuses on the development of self-efficacy as a conduit between environmental cues and

behavioral outcomes, we explored the relationships between two predominant types of i-

deals—developmental i-deals and flexibility i-deals—and employee creativity through the medi-

ating effect of creative self-efficacy (CSE). Results based on a study of 177 full-time employees

from three organizations supported our hypotheses for developmental i-deals and employee

creativity, with CSE fully mediating this relationship. We also discovered a curvilinear relation-

ship between flexibility i-deals and creativity in additional post hoc analyses. There are three

main contributions of our work. First, using social cognitive theory, we explored an internal

motivational mechanism (i.e., CSE) of these customized employment arrangements, adding to

the more traditional use of social exchange theory in the extant literature. Second, we found

that the two different types of i-deals have differential effects on employees' creativity through

the mediation mechanism of CSE. These results shed light on how the motivational properties

of i-deals differentially affect employee creativity and suggest that there may be alternative

intervening mechanisms for flexibility i-deals. Third, this study contributes to both the creativity

and human resource management literatures by examining a new type of work condition, i-

deals, that could enable employees' creativity.

KEYWORDS

creative self-efficacy, employee creativity, idiosyncratic employment arrangements

1|INTRODUCTION

Creativity, defined as the development of novel and useful ideas

about products, processes, services, or procedures, is one of the criti-

cal success factors for organizations in today's rapidly changing busi-

ness environment (e.g., Amabile, 1988; Ford, 1996; Shalley, Zhou, &

Oldham, 2004; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). There has been a

significant increase in research focusing on identifying contextual and

personal factors that foster employee creativity (e.g., Gong, Huang, &

Farh, 2009; Grant & Berry, 2011; Madjar, Greenberg, & Chen, 2011).

Meanwhile, idiosyncratic deals (i-deals hereafter) have emerged as an

effective human resource management practice that can accommo-

date individual employees' need for career development and to help

employees balance their work and personal life (Rousseau, 2001,

2005). I-deals are defined as personalized work arrangements that are

negotiated between valued employees and their employers

(Rousseau, 2001). According to a 2015 Society for Human Resource

Management survey (www.shrm.org), in the United States, 48% of

employers offer one or more flexible work arrangements to

employees. I-deals could be a particularly relevant antecedent for cre-

ativity for a number of reasons. First, i-deals are a form of organiza-

tional support that can convey confidence in employees' work, and

they also provide some degree of autonomy, both of which have been

found to be beneficial for creativity (Farmer, Tierney, & Kung-Mcin-

tyre, 2003; Shalley et al., 2004). Second, jobs that allow idiosyncratic

arrangements are often jobs that require creativity or have creativity

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21917

Hum Resour Manage. 2018;57:1443–1453. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1443