A Study Of Performance Appraisal Orientations’ Impacts On Employee Creativity Based On The Mediating Effect Of Knowledge Sharing

On the one hand, enterprises can no long maintain their competitiveness merely by expanding the scale of operation or lowering the cost of production. As the breach of the strategic decision made to adapt to the market by enterprises, innovation, rooted in employee creativity, increasingly highlights its importance and urgency. Therefore, employee creativity is the basic guarantee for the development of enterprises. On the other hand, employee creativity belongs to one of organizational citizenship behavior types and its occurrence mainly depends on the effectiveness of enterprises’ human resource management. In practice, performance appraisal, an essential part of human resource management, is often regarded as an important means used by enterprises to promote employee creativity. Unfortunately, the effect is not as significant as expected. Thus, further analysis of the relationship between these two is of vital importance to enterprises.Based on the above discussion, this study sets employee creativity as research object and focuses on the perspective of knowledge sharing, aiming to explore the influence of different performance appraisal orientations on enterprises’employee creativity. Firstly, it gathers relevant literature at home and abroad about performance appraisal orientation and employee creativity and finds out that literature that directly discusses the relationship between performance appraisal orientation and employee creativity is rare and some literature discusses these two respectively under a broader concept after sorting out gathered literature. Then, it selects knowledge sharing as the mediating variable and uncertainty avoidance differences as the moderating variable, and then builds the theoretical model of performance appraisal orientation and employee creativity. Finally, it conducts a questionnaire survey (including pre-survey and formal survey) and makes reliability and validity analyses, descriptive statistical analysis of control variables, correlation analysis and regression analysis on the basis of the collected data by SPSS, confirming the theoretical design and research hypothesis of this study eventually, and conclusions can be drawn as follows:(1)Performance appraisal orientation affects employee creativity (developmental performance appraisal orientation has a positive impact on employee creativity);(2)Knowledge sharing positively affects employee creativity;(3)Knowledge sharing plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between performance appraisal orientation (developmental performance appraisal orientation) and employee creativity;(4)Uncertainty avoidance differences play a moderating role in the relationship between performance appraisal orientation and knowledge sharing. In specific, the greater the differences in uncertainty avoidance are, the smaller positive impact developmental performance appraisal will have on employees’knowledge sharing.This study integrates these three currently hotly discussed topics, i.e., human resource management practice, knowledge management and innovation into one research model and takes one of the culture dimensions proposed by Hofstede-uncertainty avoidance into consideration, which will contributes to the enrichment of relevant theory undoubtedly. In addition, the results of this study provide enterprise managers with some practical references to adopt appropriate performance appraisal orientation to promote employee creativity and then improve enterprise overall performance.