Unintentional Harm:An Research On The Negative Effect Of Creative Employees

Creativity is not only the theme of today,but also the core strength of social development as well as corporate longevity.Many companies are willing to invest a lot of money to attract talents of high creativity.However,in practice,the participation of the creative employees often does not help tihe team to produce the synergy effect of"1+1+1>3".Due to the superior ability of the creative employees,they not only bring great benefits to the organizations,but also lead to social comparisons as well as negative problems between peers,so that the value of human capital cannot be maximized.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the negative effects of high creativity and to find regulatory mechanisms that inhibit this effect for the theoretical and practical research.Drawing from job stress and social comparison theory,we advance a new perspective to explain why high creators draw negative reactions from peers and"consider how competition climate moderate the effect.Firstly,we take the creativity gap between the most creative one and peers(i.e.relative creativity)as the starting point.And then we investigate the cognitive mechanism that relative creativity can trigger colleagues,stress and result in the da rk side.And in order to find the boundary conditions which inhibit the negative effects,we also introduce within-group and inter-group competition climate as moderators.Our results from data collected at 3 time points from 239 individuals in 80 groups largely support the proposed model.By using the data analysis software of HLM6.02,SPSS24.0 and LISREL8.70,we can draw the conclusions as follows.First,relative creativity has a significant negative impact on peers' helping behavior,and job stress is a partial mediator between them.Second,job stress from team level also has a significant positive effect on team conflict.Third,the positive relationship between relative creativity and job stress will be stronger when within-group competition climate is high,but the relationship will also be weaker by the moderation of inter-group competition.We contribute to existing literatures and practical research.Our findings broaden the field of creativity research by revealing the mechanism of its negative effect,and we also enrich the application of job stress theory.In practice,our study can also help companies to understand the double-edged sword role of high creativity employees and we can provide important suggestions for the organization's team management.