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Improving organizational newcomers’ creative job performance through creative process engagement: The moderating role of a synergy diversity climate
Author(s) -
Richard Orlando C.,
Avery Derek R.,
Luksyte Aleksandra,
Boncoeur O. Dorian,
Spitzmueller Christiane
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
personnel psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.076
H-Index - 142
eISSN - 1744-6570
pISSN - 0031-5826
DOI - 10.1111/peps.12316
Subject(s) - seniority , psychology , diversity (politics) , supervisor , social psychology , organisation climate , process (computing) , job performance , creativity , knowledge management , management , job satisfaction , sociology , political science , economics , computer science , anthropology , law , operating system
Despite the mounting research demonstrating that employee seniority positively relates to creative job performance, we predict that a synergy diversity climate eliminates the employee seniority–creative job performance relationship by unleashing the creative potential of organizational newcomers. Drawing upon the integration‐and‐learning perspective for managing diversity, Study 1 finds that a synergy diversity climate moderates the relationship between employee seniority and supervisor‐rated creative job performance lending support to our hypothesis. Study 2 provides an extension by showing how creative process engagement mediates this moderating effect on self‐rated creative performance. Finally, Study 3 replicates and extends Study 2 by demonstrating the mediating role of creative process engagement but utilizing supervisor‐rated creative job performance, while again showing synergy diversity climate to be an important boundary condition. In sum, we find that synergy diversity climate, as opposed to fairness and discrimination diversity climate, interacts with employee seniority by facilitating greater creative process engagement for newcomers subsequently impacting creative job performance. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for how the individual‐level creative job performance effects may represent a microfoundation to creative team dynamics that confer a sustainable competitive advantage.