The Effect Of Self-cognition On Employees’ Creativity

Creativity refers to the generation of novel and potentially useful ideas. Drawing on the psychological need theory, this study examined the conceptual model to identify the self-cognition factors(independent self, self-leadership, creative self-efficacy) as the antecedents of employee creativity. In the present paper, we proposed that independent self, self-leadership satisfy autonomy needs, creative self-efficacy satisfy competence need.The participants involved 449 employees in 83 teams from 7 large companies in China. Independent self, self-leadership, creative self-efficacy, and affected-based trust relationship with leaders were rated by employees, while the employee creativity is rated by their supervisors. This article assume that three basic psychological need have different effect on employees’ creativity. Autonomy and competence need can promote employees’ creativity; however, relatedness need have no significant effect to employee creativity. The hypotheses were tested by PROCESS.The results showed that(1) both independent self as the internal impetus to activate the motivation and self-leadership as the behavioral reaction to activate the motivation can enlarge employees to satisfy autonomy need and predict employees’ creativity;(2) creative self-efficacy as the internal belief to activate the motivation can enlarge employees to satisfy competence need and partly mediates the relationship between self-cognition factor and employee creativity;(3) when creative self-efficacy has the mediation role, affected-based trust relationship with a leader had a negative significant moderation effect on the relationship between independent self, self-leadership and employee creativity, Which means, employees have different creativity dynamics. For employees with the high independent self and self-leadership, the salient motivation step from themselves, however, for employees with the low independent self and self-leadership, the salient motivation of their creativity is from context factors.The research on the relationship between self-cognition and employees’ creativity can provide theoretical insights to identify the individual characters that can affect employees’ creativity. Additionally, we also require further exploring the relation of those variables. For example, the results showed that the creative self-efficacy is an effective mediation variables, however, the creative self-efficacy played partly mediation role, which means there are some other variables may affect the relationship between cognitive factors and employee creativity, such as harmonious passion(Gong et al., 2012). Finally, in the future study, we can explore whether work factors may satisfy basic psychological need, and what factors can affect creativity. Other team variables(e.g., team security climate) may also affect the relationship between self-cognition and employee creativity.