Individual Goal Orientations, Team Empowerment, and Employee Creative Performance: A Case of Cross-Level Interactions

Intrigued by relationship between team motivational context and individual characteristics in the organizational reality, we developed and tested a cross-level model to investigate the interactive effects of team empowerment and individual goal orientations on individual creative performance through the mediating mechanism of an individual\u27s creative self-efficacy. Using multi-wave multi-source data from 63 R&D teams in three IT companies, we found that (1) team empowerment, individual learning goal orientation, and individual performance orientation are all positively related to individual creative performance through mediation of creative self-efficacy; (2) learning orientation and performance approach orientation could both supplement the effects of team empowerment on individual creative self-efficacy. Our findings point to the importance of individual goal orientation in shaping the effects of team motivation climates and provide insights for both scholars and practitioners. The specific practical implications include but are not limited to (1) individuals with learning and performance approach orientations should be identified during hiring procedures given that they could still thrive in less empowered teams and maintain a relatively high level of creative self-efficacy and creative outcomes; (2) managers should consider assigning employees who are more learning oriented to more empowering and open-ended tasks in order to obtain better creative results

Making things happen : a model of proactive motivation

Being proactive is about making things happen, anticipating and preventing problems, and seizing opportunities. It involves self-initiated efforts to bring about change in the work environment and/or oneself to achieve a different future. The authors develop existing perspectives on this topic by identifying proactivity as a goal-driven process involving both the setting of a proactive goal (proactive goal generation) and striving to achieve that proactive goal (proactive goal striving). The authors identify a range of proactive goals that individuals can pursue in organizations. These vary on two dimensions: the future they aim to bring about (achieving a better personal fit within one’s work environment, improving the organization’s internal functioning, or enhancing the organization’s strategic fit with its environment) and whether the self or situation is being changed. The authors then identify “can do,” “reason to,” and “energized to” motivational states that prompt proactive goal generation and sustain goal striving. Can do motivation arises from perceptions of self-efficacy, control, and (low) cost. Reason to motivation relates to why someone is proactive, including reasons flowing from intrinsic, integrated, and identified motivation. Energized to motivation refers to activated positive affective states that prompt proactive goal processes. The authors suggest more distal antecedents, including individual differences (e.g., personality, values, knowledge and ability) as well as contextual variations in leadership, work design, and interpersonal climate, that influence the proactive motivational states and thereby boost or inhibit proactive goal processes. Finally, the authors summarize priorities for future researc

Human Resource Flexibility as a Mediating Variable Between High Performance Work Systems and Performance

Much of the human resource management literature has demonstrated the impact of high performance work systems (HPWS) on organizational performance. A new generation of studies is emerging in this literature that recommends the inclusion of mediating variables between HPWS and organizational performance. The increasing rate of dynamism in competitive environments suggests that measures of employee adaptability should be included as a mechanism that may explain the relevance of HPWS to firm competitiveness. On a sample of 226 Spanish firms, the study’s results confirm that HPWS influences performance through its impact on the firm’s human resource (HR) flexibility

The Evolution of Emotional Displays in Open Source Software Development Teams: An Individual Growth Curve Analysis

Software developers communicate and interact with each other in order to solve complex problems. Such communication often includes emotional displays that have been shown to influence team processes and performance. Yet, little is known about the evolution of team emotional displays. Hence, we investigate a sample of 1121 Open Source Software (OSS) projects from GitHub, using longitudinal data analysis. The results from growth curve analysis shows that the team emotional display decrease over time. This negative linear trend decelerates mid-term as suggested by a positive quadratic trend of time. Such deceleration diminishes toward the end as a negative cubic trend suggests