The Relation Between Time Pressure, Job Complexity And Creativity:Moderating Effects Of Conscientiousness And Trust

Employee creativity is not only a hot research field of organizational behavior, but also a hot research field of business practices. When creativity concept was Since its debut in academia, creativity had got great scholarly attention, which is the theoretical value of creativity research. Continuous innovation is the relentless pursuit of enterprises, which is the practical value of creativity research. A large number of empirical studies have shown that creativity can improve organizational performance and promote organizational innovation. Early research on employee creativity has focused mainly on the impact of either individual characteristics or work situations on employee creativity. Drawing on an interactionist perspective, more and more researchers have recently begun to study the joint effect of multiple factors on employee creativity. That is, individual factors and situational factors, including work contexts and social contexts-have a combining effect on employee creativity. With the increasing complexity and variance in work designs, job stressors inevitably become situational factors and have a very important influence on employees creativity. Building on a stress perspective of work design, this study therefore chose two work contexts-time pressure and job complexity-that could be stressors to study their curvilinear relationships with employee creativity. According to the interactive perspective theory of creativity, I introduced conscientiousness-a individual factor-and trust in leadership-a social context and studied how such two factors would moderate the curvilinear relationships between time pressure or job complexity and employee creativity. In exploring how conscientiousness serves as a specific individual trait to influence work stress and employee creativity, this study fills the gap of how a single dimension of Big-Five traits influences employee creativity. This research also explores the impact of a specific social context- trust in leadership-could moderate the relationship between stress and employee creativity, which adds values to the influence of social contexts on employee creativity.This study used a questionnaire research method to collected data of 31 leaders and 274 employees in three manufacturing enterprises in industrial park in Zhangjiajie, Hunan Province several times. This research conducted data analyses through Lisrel and SPSS softwares. Specifically, I used Lisrel software for conducting Confirmatory Factor Analyses that include reliability and construct validity. Then I took use of SPSS software for data descriptive statistics. Finally, hierarchical regression analysis used to test the hypotheses.The conclusions of this research are as follows:(1) I found the U-shaped relationship between job complexity and employee creativity. Specifically, employee creativity is lowest when job complexity at intermediate levels. (2) I found the moderating effect of conscientiousness on the relationship between time pressure and employee creativity. When conscientiousness is high, lowest employee creativity occurred at intermediate levels of time pressure; when conscientiousness is high, the relationship between time pressure and employee creativity is not significant. (3) I also found that conscientiousness and trust have joint effect on the relation between time pressure and employee creativity. Specifically, when employees scoring high on both conscientiousness and trust, the relationship between time pressure and employee creativity was not significant; when employees scoring high on conscientiousness but low on trust, highest employee creativity occurred at intermediate levels of time pressure; when employees scoring low on conscientiousness but high on trust, the relationship between time pressure and employee creativity was not significant; when employees scoring low on both conscientiousness and trust, lowest employee creativity occurred at intermediate levels of time pressure. (4) I also found a positive effect between conscientiousness and employee creativity.