Research On The Relationship Between Illegitimate Tasks And Employee Creativity

With the development of economy and the progress of science and technology,the speed of product change of enterprises is further accelerated,and the market competition they face is also more intense.In the current environment,it is particularly important for enterprise managers to improve their creativity and enhance their competitiveness so that their companies can have a better future.As an important foundation of enterprise creativity,employee creativity plays an indispensable role in the development of enterprise creativity.Illegitimate tasks,one kind of workplace stressors that has been proposed in recent years,have been shown to be closely related to employees’ negative emotions and behaviors in the workplace.However,few studies have explored the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employee creativity and its specific influence mechanism.This study intends to explore the influence mechanism of illegitimate tasks on employee creativity,so as to make up for the deficiencies of previous studies.By integrating social exchange theory and dual-process model,this study proposes that illegitimate tasks have negative effect on employee creativity via psychological entitlement and job frustration.In addition,based on the conservation of resource theory,we argue that workplace social support moderates the effect of illegitimate tasks on employee psychological entitlement and job frustration.In this study,we collect data from 573 leaders and employees from different industries by questionnaires and we use the leader-employee matching method to match the data.We use correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis to verify our model and hypothesis,and the results shows that:1.Illegitimate tasks is negatively related to employee creativity and negatively predicts employee creativity.2.Employees’ psychological entitlement mediates the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employee creativity.3.Job frustration mediates the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employee creativity.4.Workplace social support(WSS)moderates the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employees’ psychological entitlement such that illegitimate tasks will be more weakly related to psychological entitlement when WSS is high rather than low.5.Workplace social support(WSS)moderates the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employees’ job frustration such that illegitimate tasks will be more weakly related to job frustration when WSS is high rather than low.Through the empirical analysis,this study answered questions of "the relationship between illegitimate tasks and employee creativity" and "the influence mechanism of illegitimate tasks on employee creativity",and "how to weaken the negative effects of illegitimate tasks on employee’ creativity".Also,this study provides useful ideas on how to improve the employee creativity for managers and enterprises.