توانمندسازی و خلاقیت :تحقیقات سطح مقطعی

Drawing upon social learning and self-determination theories, we hypothesized and tested a chain mediating process linking empowerment to employee creativity. Based on data from 385 employees working with 104 supervisors in multiple organizations in China, we conducted cross-level path analyses and found that (1) structural empowerment partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment, (2) psychological empowerment fully mediated the relationship between structural empowerment and creativity, and (3) structural and psychological empowerment sequentially mediates the relationship between transformational leadership and creativity. This study integrated different perspectives of empowerment and provides important insights into the mechanisms linking empowerment with creativity.

Because of the demonstrated relationship between employees' creativity and organizational innovation, performance and survival (Amabile, 1996, Nonaka, 1991 and Shalley et al., 2004), numerous studies have examined the direct and indirect impact of personal and contextual variables on employees' creativity in the workplace (Amabile et al., 2004, Roden and Galunic, 2004, Shalley et al., 2004 and Tierney and Farmer, 2002). Creativity refers to the production of novel and useful ideas by an individual or by a group of individuals working together (Amabile, 1988, Madjar et al., 2002, Shalley et al., 2000 and Zhou and Shalley, 2003). Among these prior studies, an important stream of research highlights different perspectives of empowerment on employee creativity. For example, researchers have found support for the positive effect of transformational leadership (Shin & Zhou, 2003), delegation (Chen & Aryee, 2007), and psychological empowerment (Alge, Ballinger, Tangirala, & Oakley, 2006) on employee creativity. In terms of motivational effects on employees, empowerment has been examined in the literature in three broad categories (Leach et al., 2003, Menon, 2001 and Spreitzer, 1995): leadership, structural, and psychological perspectives. From the leadership perspective, the emphasis has been on the energizing aspect of leaders' empowering styles and behaviors. Supervisors can energize and empower their subordinates to perform by providing an exciting vision for the future. Through transformational leadership, leaders inspire subordinates to participate in the process of transforming the organization ( Menon, 2001 and Yukl, 1989). Consistent with prior research (e.g., Kark et al., 2003, Kirkman et al., 2009 and Shamir et al., 1998), we conceptualize transformational leadership as a group-level phenomenon. From the structural perspective, structural empowerment focuses on policies and practices enacted by management aimed at cascading power, decision-making authority and responsibility down to lower levels of the organization ( Blau and Alba, 1982, Bowen and Lawler, 1992, Conger and Kanungo, 1988, Eylon and Bamberger, 2000, Mathieu et al., 2006 and Spreitzer, 2007). Seibert, Silver, and Randolph (2004) conceptualized structural empowerment as empowerment climate, representing employees' shared perceptions of managerial structures, policies, and practices related to empowerment ( Biron and Bamberger, 2010 and Tuuli and Rowlinson, 2009). Consistent with this conceptualization, we use structural empowerment and empowerment climate interchangeably in the present study. We also follow prior research (e.g., Seibert et al., 2004) to treat structural empowerment as a work-unit level construct. From the psychological perspective, psychological empowerment has been conceptualized as a multidimensional construct manifested in four cognitions (Spreitzer, 1996): meaning (i.e., value of work goal or purpose), competence (i.e., self-efficacy), self-determination (i.e., autonomy in initiation and continuation of work behaviors), and impact (i.e., influence on work outcomes). As a psychological state, psychological empowerment has been treated as an individual-level variable. Despite past research efforts linking empowerment to creativity, two critical questions remain unanswered. First, a major inconsistency across these three streams of research on empowerment is that these perspectives identify empowerment at two different levels of analysis, i.e., either individual level or group level. Researchers have called for theoretical integrations of these different levels in empowerment research (e.g., Menon, 2001) and some have attempted to build a linkage between them (e.g., Alge et al., 2006, Avolio et al., 2004, Mathieu et al., 2006, Ozaralli, 2003 and Seibert et al., 2004). However, questions remain regarding how to “determine the specific impact of empowerment at multiple levels of analysis and thus identify optimal levels of empowerment” (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Little research to date has provided an integration of these three perspectives of empowerment at multiple levels of analysis. Furthermore, there is a demand for future research to consider the multilevel nature of empowerment, particularly regarding the specific situations and contexts in which there is a need for employees to be creative (Zhang & Bartol, 2010). Second, prior research on creativity has largely been guided by intrinsic motivation theory (Amabile, 1996, Oldham and Cummings, 1996, Shalley, 1995 and Shin and Zhou, 2003). Along this vein, intrinsic motivation is considered a mediating variable through which contextual factors contribute to creativity (Amabile, 1988, Oldham and Cummings, 1996 and Shin and Zhou, 2003). However, results of testing this claim have been inconsistent (Amabile et al., 1990, Shalley and Perry-Smith, 2001 and Shin and Zhou, 2003). Thus, it is important to examine other potential mediators (Shalley et al., 2004) for explaining the relationship between contexts and employee creativity. To address these research gaps, we draw upon social learning theory and self-determination theory to hypothesize that (1) structural empowerment has a mediating effect on the relationship between transformational leadership and psychological empowerment, (2) psychological empowerment mediates the effect of structural empowerment on employee creativity, and (3) structural and psychological empowerment sequentially mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and employee creativity. This study contributes to the literature in two important ways. First, by examining structural empowerment as a mediating variable in the transformational leadership–psychological empowerment relationship, this study extends previous research that has primarily examined the direct or main effect of transformational leadership on psychological empowerment (e.g., Avolio et al., 2004). Understanding the mediators of this relationship provides theoretical insights into the mechanism through which transformational leadership affects psychological empowerment. Although the relationship between leadership and group climate has been extensively examined, the present study is among the first to examine the effect of transformational leadership on structural empowerment (which is operationalized as a climate variable). Second, this study extends the stream of research on the impact of transformational leadership on creativity. It provides an alternative mechanism (i.e. other than intrinsic motivation) to account for the influence of transformational leadership on employee creativity (Shin and Zhou, 2003 and Zhang and Bartol, 2010). Specifically, we examine the potential mediating effect of psychological empowerment. Fig. 1 depicts our conceptual model.

The study integrates three perspectives of empowerment (leadership, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment) in an overall model to examine their effects on employee creativity. Drawing upon the social learning and self-determination theories, we found various mediating roles of empowerment variables. Structural empowerment partially mediates the relationship between transformational relationship and psychological empowerment. Psychological empowerment has a direct effect on creativity. Structural empowerment has an indirect effect on creativity through psychological empowerment. We found that transformational leadership has an indirect effect on creativity through structural and psychological empowerment. These results highlight the mechanisms of the effect of empowerment on employee creativity, and offer insights on how to enhance employee creativity from the various empowerment perspectives.