Emotional Intelligence And Innovation Performance

Emotion and innovation both are the hot areas of research in the field of organization and Management Psychology study. Because of the complexity and multidimensional of the concept itself, there are still a lot of blank in the research of their relationship,especially the mechanism.However,the academic circle should increase their exploration to answer the question that how to improve the innovation level of Chinese enterprises and build an innovative country.Based on the social constructivist view of emotion and Role Identity Thoery, the main objective of this paper was to explore the relationship between emotional intelligence and employee innovation performance, as well as the mediating role of creative process engagement and the moderating role of creative role identity.We used Wong and Law’s WLEIS to measure the employee emotional intelligence.Then,Farmer,Tinerney and Kung-Mclntyre’s questionnaire for creative role identity; Zhang and Bartol’s questionnaire for creative process engagement;Janssen Van Yperen’s questionnaire for innovation performance.Our sample consisted of286employees and their immediate supervisors from12enterprises in the area of Hunan province, Guangdong province, Chongqing province and so on. The research used statistical software such as SPSS and AMOS, then correlation analysis, factor analysis, regression analysis and mediating effect test were used in the study, too.The results showed that:(1)There was a significant positive correlation between employee emotional intelligence and innovation performance. When employees emotional intelligence was high, the probability of innovative performance was also increased.(2)The correlation relationship between employees emotional intelligence and innovative performance was mediated by creative process engagement.(3)Creative role identity positively moderated the relationship between employees emotional intelligence and creative process engagement. In other words, the main effect was stronger when the moderator was high.(4)Creative role identity acted as a mediated-moderator which moderated the relationship between employee emotional intelligence and innovation performance.At the end, the implications, limitations of our study and future research directions were pointed out.