Skip to main content
Log in

The effect of informal status on employee creative performance: a moderated mediation model

  • Published:
Current Psychology Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

As an essential factor for sustainable business development, creative performance has received increasing attention from both management and academia. Formal status has been confirmed to affect creative performance positively, but few studies have investigated the mechanisms by which informal status affects creative performance. Based on Status Characteristics Theory, this study introduces career calling and collectivism orientation to investigate the intrinsic mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between informal status and employee creative performance. By collecting paired data from 216 employees across three stages, we test our hypotheses using the hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods. Our study verifies that informal status impacts creative performance positively, that career calling partially mediates the relationship between informal status and creative performance, and that collectivism orientation positively moderates the relationship between informal status and career calling and moderates the mediating effect of career calling in this context. By constructing an integrated model of the link between informal status and creative performance, we further enrich and extend related studies.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2

Similar content being viewed by others

Data availability

Some or all data, models, or codes generated or used during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.

References

Download references

Acknowledgements

All authors sincerely thank the reviewers and editors for their enthusiastic and patient work during the review procedure.

Funding

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Science Fund of Ministry of Education of China (Grant numbers 21YJA630118) and National Social Science Fund of China (Grant numbers 22BGL133).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. All authors were involved in the conception and design of the study. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were done by Wei He and Ran Li. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Zheng Zhang and Wei He, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Wei He.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there are no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study was approved by the Bioethics Committee of Shanxi University of Finance and Economics.

Consent to participate

All participants gave informed consent.

Consent for publication

We will grant the Publisher an exclusive license to publish the article.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

Supplementary file1 (DOCX 17 KB)

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zhang, Z., He, W. & Li, R. The effect of informal status on employee creative performance: a moderated mediation model. Curr Psychol 42, 28320–28331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03973-4

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-03973-4

Keywords

Navigation