Employee Goal Orientation, Work Unit Goal Orientation and Employee Creativity

Abstract

For employee creativity to occur, organizations must build a context conducive to creativity, in addition to identifying employees with creative potential. Complementing and extending earlier research, we develop and test a cross‐level model about how work unit goal orientation might relate to employee creativity. We also theorize and examine the mediating role of employee information elaboration linking work unit goal orientation and employee creativity. We conduct a questionnaire survey based on multi‐source data from 340 employees comprising 53 teams in eight Taiwanese organizations. The results indicate that the work unit goal orientation is positively, whereas the work unit performance‐avoidance orientation is negatively, related to employee creativity through employee information elaboration. Furthermore, work unit goal orientation also plays a cross‐level moderating role: the positive relationship between individual‐level learning orientation and information elaboration is stronger when work unit learning orientation is higher, but weaker when work unit avoidance orientation is higher.