Research On The Causal Loop Mechanism Of Work Passion Affecting Employee's Creative Performance

In the volatile,uncertain,complex and ambiguous era(VUCA),innovative ability is the key source for enterprises to adapt to the environment and gain competitive advantages.And employee's creativity is the foundation of organizational innovative ability.The research on employee's creative performance has focused on the influence of motivation variables and emotional variables on creativity for a long time,and achieved rich research results.With further research,researchers found that creative performance is the result of multiple interactions among motivation,cognition and emotion subsystems.Neither motivation or emotion variables are enough to explain the formation of creative performance independently,calling for the concept that can integrate the three mechanisms and predict creative performance more systematically.Work passion is a complex structure which contains emotion,motivation,cognition and other components.Exploring the relationship between work passion and creative performance may achieve results beyond the existing motivation and emotional variables.However,there is not enough empirical research supporting the positive effect of work passion on creative performance.Whether the work passion can predict creative performance or whether different types of work passion have different effects on creative performance has not reached a consensus.The reason for the divergence is that work passion is a brand new construct.There is no theoretical model that can fully explain its structure,source,and effectiveness.In addition,work passion is a situational variable that is self-regulated and is affected by the external environment.According to the Affective Event Theory,There may be a non-recursive relationship between work passion and creative performance.Therefore,research on the impact of work passion on creative performance needs to go beyond the goal of establishing a causal relationship model pursued by traditional organizational behavior research and construct a causal loop model between work passion and creative performance.Towards that,this research combine theoretical research and empirical testing with literature research,grounded theory,longitudinal empirical research methods,and dynamic computational modeling.The literature review systematically sorts out the research status of creative performance,work passion,the relationship between work passion and creative performance,and the applicability of computational modeling in organizational behavior research.Based on the literature review,we explored the composition and structure of work passion according to the grounded theory.We collected about 2,000 employees in more than ten provinces and cities including Beijing,Shanghai,Shandong,Hubei,and Shanxi to collect longitudinal empirical data.Based on data analysis,the component structure of work passion was clarified,and the relationship and influence mechanism of work passion and creative performance were revealed.With the help of computational modeling,a causal loop model of work passion affecting creative performance was constructed.Breakthrough research results are as follows:Firstly,Study 1 found the components and structure of work passion,compiled the work passion scale for employees in accordance with the Chinese context,constructed the work passion measurement index,and provided a measurement tool for empirical research.Study 1 combines quantitative research methods such as grounded theory,project analysis,exploratory factor analysis,and confirmatory factor analysis to determine the second-order four-factor component model of the work passion for employees in China,including the emotional component(love for work,recognition at work),motivation component(internal value-driven,external factor-driven),cognitive component(cognition of the importance of work)and willingness component(desire to work).These four components are indispensable.In order to distinguish work passion and similar concepts,this research uses the form of component product to construct an employee work passion measurement index,which provides an effective measurement tool for subsequent research.Secondly,Study 2 confirmed the impact and path of work passion on employees' creative performance.Employees with work passion will trigger individual self-regulation.Job crafting is a typical self-regulation behavior in the workplace.It is verified that the role of job crafting in mediating work passion and creative performance can improve the self-regulation impact path of work passion.Study2 verified the positive predictive effect of employee work passion on creative performance through the data of 721 participants,and found the mediating role of employee job crafting,which provided material support for the subsequent construction of employee self-regulation feedback loop.Thirdly,Study 3 Introduced the time dimension to explore the causal relationship between creative performance and work passion.Based on Study 2,Sub-Study 1 of Study 3 introduces the time dimension.The cross-lagged analysis is used to verify the positive impact of employee creative performance at t1 on employee passion at t2,indicating that there may be a causal loop between employee work passion and creative performance.Because work passion is a situational variable,the positive effect of high-performance human resource practices on work passion was verified in research Sub-study 2 and different moderating effects of different regulatory focus(promotion orientation,prevention orientation)were found,specifically promoting orientation can positively enhance the impact of high-performance human resource practices on employees' work passion,and the moderating role of prevention orientation is not significant,providing model structure and data support for the subsequent construction of computational models.Fourthly,The computational modeling is introduced to simulate and verify the causal loop model of the impact of work passion on creative performance.In study 4,a feedback loop based on self-regulation of employees' work passion and creative performance is constructed,and high-performance human resource practice is added as the organizational environment.Based on different ways of self-regulation(promotion orientation and prevention orientation),simulation is carried out,simulating the change situation for 24 months.It is found that there is a causal loop between work passion and creative performance.Employees with high work passion will actively reshape their work,and then generate creative performance.Employees compare their own creative performance with the standard of creative performance required by the organization.When there are discrepancy in the comparison,it will stimulate employees' self-regulation and enhance their work passion,so as to keep approaching the creative performance required by the organization.When the creative performance perceived by employees reaches the organizational standard,the model does not stop running immediately,but continues to play a positive role in the work passion of employees.When the organization intervenes in the practice of high-performance human resources,it can promote the transformation between work passion and creative performance,and for the employees with promotion orientation,the positive effect of high-performance human resources practice is more obvious.Study 4 provides strong evidence for the construction of causal loop theory that work passion affects creative performance.At the end of the study,the general discussion,conclusions the limitations and the future research were proposed.