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The effects of job involvement and supervisor developmental feedback on employee creativity: A polynomial regression with response surface analysis

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Abstract

This paper aims to explore how job involvement and supervisor developmental feedback (SDF) interact to affect employee creativity. Through the lens of person-supervisor fit theory, we employed polynomial regression with response surface analysis to map the interconnections between job involvement, SDF, and creativity. We conducted two independent studies to investigate the relationship. In the first study, we analyzed 389 MBA students’ (former and current) responses from a large university in China and in the second study, we surveyed 392 full time employees from a high-technology company. The two studies confirmed a dynamic relationship among these three variables (i.e., job involvement, SDF, and creativity). The polynomial regression results indicated that employee creativity peaks when job involvement and SDF are both high. In addition, when job involvement is low but SDF is high, or vice versa, employee creativity is at a high level as well.

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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the base of humanities and social science and logistics research center in University of Henan province under grant No. 2017-JD-04.

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  1. School of Management, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China

    Guangping Li

  2. Department of Organization, Workforce, and Leadership Studies, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX, USA

    Lei Xie

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  1. Guangping Li
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Guangping Li and Lei Xie contributed equally to this paper and should be considered co-first authors. 

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Li, G., Xie, L. The effects of job involvement and supervisor developmental feedback on employee creativity: A polynomial regression with response surface analysis. Curr Psychol 42, 17120–17131 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-02901-w

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