Extending the JD-R approach to predicting work/study engagement and creative performance : evidences from Chinese employees and students

Although innovation and creativity play an increasingly important role in helping organizations survive in today’s highly competitive environment, less is known about the antecedents and mechanisms of creative performance in the Chinese context. To bridge the gap of knowledge, this thesis adopted and extended Bakker (2011)’s Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R model) to exploring four antecedents of creative performance, namely, creative requirement (job demand), creative self-efficacy (personal resource), perceived support for creativity (job resource), and work/study engagement. It was hypothesized that engagement would mediate the positive effect of creative self-efficacy, perceived support for creativity and creative requirement on creative performance. Creative requirement would moderate the effect of creative self-efficacy, perceived support for creativity on engagement. Self-reported questionnaires were distributed to Office staff (n=154) and supermarket staff (n=158) from Mainland China. Undergraduates (N=194) were recruited from a university in Hong Kong and were asked to complete a self-reported questionnaire that included both subjective and objective tests for creativity performance. Hierarchical linear regression analyses with Bootstrapping procedures were conducted separately to test the proposed hypothesized model among the three participant groups. It was found that the hypothesized model was partially supported across all the samples. Also, different mediation mechanisms of engagement were found between employee and student samples. Engagement was found to partially mediate the positive effect of perceived support for creativity on (both subjective and objective) creative performance among three samples; yet it only partially mediated the positive effect of creative self-efficacy on employees’ creative performance. In addition, only creative self-efficacy was found to be a significant predictor of (both subjective and objective) creative performance across all three samples. Also, no moderation effects were supported. Nevertheless, the main contributions of this study to the existing creativeperformance literature are mainly twofold: (a) extending the JD-R model to incorporate creativity and (b) generalizing the JD-R model to the Chinese context. Finally, recommendations for promoting employees and undergraduates’ creative performance are discussed in the thesis