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Employees’ feeling trusted, self-concept and creativity in collectivistic cultures

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Abstract

Existing research have revealed the positive impact of trust on employee’s creativity. Given that perception is the precursor of action, influence of trust on creativity tends to occur through employees’ perception and the process of the perceptual reaction of the self, which, however, fail to gain extensive attention in literature. Drawing on theories of social exchange and self-consistency, we develop a model to understand how employees in collectivistic cultures evaluate feeling trusted and regulate themselves in creativity by considering the role of self-concept. We test our model using a time-lagged design to collect data from the supervisor–subordinate dyads in two stages in China. Results show that organization-based self-esteem mediate the positive relationship between feeling trusted and creativity, and interdependent self-construal plays a moderating role in such relationship. Specifically, for subordinates with high interdependent self-construal, the positive relationship between organization-based self-esteem and creativity is not significant. Our research provide insight into how self-concept shapes the impact of leadership in term of trust on creativity theoretically, and practically contribute to management of trust and encouragement on employees’ creativity.

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Acknowledgements

Author H.L., Wang has received research grants from National Natural Science foundation of China (72172047; 71872066)

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  1. School of Business Administration, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China

    Hongli Wang & Cuiqi Liang

  2. Huddersfield Business School, HD1 3DH, Queensgate, UK

    Qihai Huang

  3. Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Xinzhong Xu

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Wang, H., Huang, Q., Xu, X. et al. Employees’ feeling trusted, self-concept and creativity in collectivistic cultures. Curr Psychol 43, 8972–8988 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04938-x

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