Dynamic Research On The Relationship Between Nostalgic Experience And Creativity:the Moderating Roles Of Sleep Quality And Education Level

Creativity can improve business competitiveness,and so many scholars are devoted to exploring the law of employees' creativity.To date,researches on employees' creativity has focused almost exclusively on either individual differences or work-based antecedents.However,this neglected the spillover effect of nonwork-based antecedents on employee creativity.Additionally,the between-person perspective ignored short-term within-person creativity fluctuations.In the workplace,although one employee's overall creativity may be high,his or her creativity may be low on some specific working days.As research focus is shifting from static(between-person perspective)to dynamic approach(within-person perspective),researchers pay more attention to employees' short-term creativity fluctuations and the related mechanism.In order to response this call,this study examined how daily nostalgic experience predicted daily fluctuations of creativity,and how daily core self-evaluation mediated the relationship between daily nostalgic experience and daily creativity.In addition,we separately investigated the moderating role of nightly sleep quality and education level in the relationship between daily nostalgic experience and daily core self-evaluation.The data was collected from 128 full-time employees in 5 consecutive workdays by experience sampling methods.Before daily data was collected one week in advance,each participant was asked to complete a general paper-questionnaire including demographic variables such as gender,age,education level and tenure.Meanwhile,participants were also told that in the next 5 consecutive workdays,they will complete daily questionnaires which included nostalgia experience,core self-evaluation,sleep quantity and quality as well as their creativity.Finally,we obtained 530 within-person data points from 106 participants.The multi-level regression analysis results showed(1)at within-person level,daily nostalgic experience makes significant positive effect on daily creativity;(2)daily core self-evaluation partially mediated the positive relationship between daily nostalgic experience and creativity;(3)nightly sleep quality negatively moderates the relationship between daily nostalgic experience and daily core self-evaluation.That is,when nightly sleep quality was lower,the positive relationship of between daily nostalgic experience and core self-evaluation was stronger;(4)education level also negatively cross-level moderates the relationship between daily nostalgic experience and core self-evaluation.That is,for individuals with lower education level,the positive relation of daily nostalgic experience with core self-evaluation was stronger.Additionally,a moderated mediation model was examined and the results suggested that nightly sleep quality(within-person-level)and education level(between-person-level)also moderates the indirect effect of daily core self-evaluation,such that the indirect effect was stronger when the nightly sleep quality and education level were low rather than high,respectively.The theoretical implications of this research is that this study have verified the dynamic effect of daily nostalgic experience and nightly sleep quality as nonwork antecedents that affect individual daily creativity.Our results indicate that nonwork factors can indeed be important predictors of creativity.On the other hand,we introduced education level,and extended the multi-level antecedents of the short-term fluctuation of daily creativity and its mechanism.Our findings provide some insights on how managers stimulate and enhance the employee's daily creativity.