Exploring The Influence Mechanism Of Individual Boundary-spanning Activity On Employee Creativity

With the intensified competition among enterprises,the demand for innovation are much higher than before.Both the high innovation demands and complex external environment make the enterprises,which work behind closed doors,unable to meet the requirements of the rapid development.Research shows that compared with internal activities within organizations,boundary-spanning activities are more suitable for enhancing both the individuals' and the whole teams' innovative performance.The fact that employees acquire external knowledge and information through boundary-spanning activities has become a primary source of individual creativity and team innovation.Therefore,boundary-spanning activities among work teams and individuals are becoming more and more frequent and important.There are still some arguments about the relationship between boundary-spanning activities and creativity in the established research.The present study attempts to explore and explain the function of the interaction between individual boundary-spanning activities and employee creativity.Based upon the challenge stress theory,this paper introduces challenge stress as the mediator and discuss its indirect effect between boundary-spanning activities and individual creativity.Meanwhile,the paper also discusses the moderating effect of collectivism between individual boundary-spanning and challenge stress.In this study,190 valid dyadic supervisor-employee questionnaires from 3 technical companies were obtained through field investigation.Using SPSS 21.0 and its plug-in-Hayes'(2013)PROCESS,we complete the data processing analysis.The results show that the individual boundary-spanning activities and challenge stress are positively related and challenge stress has a positive impact on employee creativity,which indicates that individual boundary-spanning activities are able to promote employee creativity through promoting employees' challenge stress,in which challenge stress plays a mediating effect.Moreover,the data confirms the moderating effect of collectivism such that the positive relationship between individual boundary-spanning activities and challenge stress will be strengthened for individuals with high collectivism.The conclusion and discussion have proposed the theoretical contributions,managerial significance,and the limitations and perspectives for future research...