A Study On The Mechanism Of The Effect Of Learned Helplessness On Employees’ Creativity

Employee creativity is the basis and premise of promoting sustainable innovation, and it is very important for the performance and development of the organization. It can help enterprises solve various difficult problems and difficulties in achieving goals. Especially in the current increasingly sophisticated market economy environment, enterprises need to rely on staff’s creativity and new ideas to maintain its competitive advantage in the market.However, new ideas or new creations are not necessarily produced. Creativity is a difficult task, which is full of risk and challenge, it is difficult to achieve the perfect success in the first attempt, the experience of failure and frustration is inevitable. According to the study, the failure rate of an innovative task is as high as 40% to 90%, while the long-term failure is easy to make people feel discouraged, and even produce learned helplessness, which leads to the failure of creative tasks. Taking the Vietnamese enterprises as an example, due to the production technology is developing, the failure of employees to perform creative tasks is not uncommon, it is very easy to cause the staff to have learned helplessness.Related research pointed out that the acquisition of helplessness is not just a psychological phenomenon of ordinary people. Numerous studies have proved that the learned helplessness is generally found in the enterprise employees and leads to the decline in the performance of the staff, enterprises should intervene and control in time. But most of the past studies have focused on the positive effects of positive factors on employee creativity, such as self-efficacy, organizational support, and so on. Scholars pay less attention to the negative factors to explore why the employees’ creativity is restrained and put forward the corresponding prevention strategies. The relationship between the learned helplessness and employee creativity has not been deeply studied. More and more evidences show that it is more necessary to study how to prevent the negative effects of negative factors on creativity than to study the positive factors.In view of the creative task has a higher risk of failure, according to the theory of learned helplessness, if an employee fails in the process of creation, it is likely that he will have learned helplessness caused by failure. What kind of influence does this kind of mentality have on employee creativity? Can this be intervened? No standard answer has been found yet.To clarify the above questions, this paper takes the learned helplessness theory as the research perspective. The study analyzed the logical relationship between learned helplessness and employee creativity systematically, and it induced leadership behavior, perceived organizational support and employ learning behaviors from failures as the strategy that intervened the influence of learned helplessness on employee creativity combined with the interaction perspective of environmental factors and individual factors. Finally, the study constructed the learned helplessness-creativity theory model. The model is that learned helplessness would have negative effect on employee creativity directly and it would restrained employee creativity through three different ways namely intrinsic motivation, creative self-efficacy and creative role identity. However, leadership behavior, perceived organizational support and employee failure learning could alleviate the negative impact of the mechanism in different degree.In order to test the learned helplessness-creativity theory model above, the study used the data of the enterprises of Hochiminh City, Binhduong Province, Dongnai province and so on. The study started the empirical analysis on three function paths mechanism through three empirical studies.Study 1 discussed the direct effect of learned helplessness and employee creativity firstly, at the same time, the study tested the first path mechanism of the relationship between learned helplessness and employee creativity, namely intrinsic motivation path in which transformation leadership of situational factor as intervention strategy. Therefore, the study built a hierarchical mediated moderation effect model by regarding intrinsic motivation as mediating variable and transformational leadership as moderating variable, hierarchical linear model(HLM) and Mplus Multi-layer linear model analysis technique was adopted to improve the hypothesis test. After empirical analysis, we found that(1) learned helplessness will indeed reduce the level of employee creativity.(2) Learned helplessness will indeed restrain the level of employee intrinsic motivation.(3) Intrinsic motivation mediated the negative effect of learned helplessness on creativity partly.(4) Transformational leadership had a positive moderating effect between learned helplessness and creativity, namely the negative effect of learned helplessness on employee creativity is weaker on the boundary conditions of high transformational leadership. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.(5) Transformational leadership had a positive moderating effect between learned helplessness and intrinsic motivation, namely the negative effect of learned helplessness on employee intrinsic motivation is weaker on the boundary conditions of high transformational leadership. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.(6) Transformational leadership had a positive moderating effect between learned helplessness and employee creativity through regarding intrinsic motivation as mediation, namely when the transformational leadership is higher, the negative effect of learned helplessness on employee creativity is weaker through regarding intrinsic motivation as mediation. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.Study 2 tested the second path mechanism of the relationship between learned helplessness and employee creativity, namely creative self-efficacy path in which spiritual leadership of situational factor as intervention strategy. Therefore, we introduced creative self-efficacy as mediating variable and spiritual leadership as moderating variable in the study. The study built a hierarchical mediated moderation effect model and adopt hierarchical linear model(HLM) and Mplus Multi-layer linear model analysis technique to achieved hypothesis test. After empirical analysis, we found that(1) learned helplessness will reduce creative self-efficacy of employee.(2) Creative self-efficacy will promote employee creativity.(3)Creative self-efficacy of employee mediated the negative effect of learned helplessness on creativity partly.(4) Spiritual leadership had a positive moderating function between learned helplessness and creative self-efficacy, namely the negative influence of learned helplessness on creative self-efficacy of employee weaker on the boundary condition of high spiritual leadership. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.(5) Spiritual leadership had a positive moderating function between learned helplessness and employee creativity through regarding creative self-efficacy as mediation, namely when spiritual leadership is higher, the negative effect of learned helplessness on employee creativity is weaker through regarding creative self-efficacy as mediation. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.Study 3 tested the third path mechanism of the relationship between learned helplessness and employee creativity, namely creative role identity path in which employee perceived organizational support and employee learning behaviors from failures as intervention strategy. This study built a higher-order mediated moderating effect model by introducing creative role identity as mediating variable, perceived organizational support as moderating variable and employee learning behaviors from failures as higher-order moderating variable. The study adopted Hayes(2013)conditional process analysis to improve the hypothesis test. We found that(1) learned helplessness reduced creative role identity variable of employee.(2) Creative role identity promoted the employee creativity.(3)Creative role identity mediated the negative effect of learned helplessness on employee creativity partly.(4) Perceived organizational support had a positive moderating function between learned helplessness and creative role identity.(5)On this basis of moderated creative role identity, perceived organizational support moderated the relationship between learned helplessness and employee creativity positively by regarding creative role identity as the medium, namely the negative influence of learned helplessness on employee creativity through creative role identity weaker. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.(6)the fact that perceived organizational support moderated the relationship between learned helplessness on employee creativity through regarding creative role identity as the medium was positively moderated by employee learning behaviors from failures again, namely when employee learning behaviors from failures is higher, the positive effect of mediated moderation of perceived organizational support on learned helplessness, creative role identity and employee creativity is stronger. On the contrary the influence would be stronger.Through three empirical studies above, the study confirmed that the learned helplessness-creativity theory model conforms to practical significance. The paper put forward management practice enlightenment based on the studies above as well as the study limitations and future research prospects were discussed.