BUS603: Managing People

Previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of congruent personal and environmental characteristics on creativity. None of them, however, has tested the formal theory of person-environment fit for predicting creativity in the context of multicultural experiences. This study examined the effects of two versions of person-environment fit (Demands-abilities fit and Needs-supplies fit) on employee creativity in China, taking into account the moderating role of multicultural experiences. The results, based on the data of East Asian Social Survey in the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) in 2015, showed employees with demands-abilities fit have lower creativity than those with demands-abilities misfit; nevertheless, the demands-abilities fit creates a growing impact on employee creativity with increasing multicultural experience. Additionally, the higher the needs-supplies fit, the stronger the employee creativity; and, the needs-supplies fit creates a growing impact on employee creativity with increasing multicultural experience. It shows that different versions of person–environment fit have different effects on employee creativity and multicultural experience moderated the effects of person-environment fit on employee creativity. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

With the development of economic globalization and modern science and technology, the world economy is marching from the era of industrialization toward that of knowledge economy, and the economic growth is increasingly driven by technological innovation. In this context, creativity has become dramatically pivotal to companies aspiring to gain advantages in an ever-increasingly competitive market environment. This is not only embodied in the fact that creativity is crucial to an organization's economic success, but that creativity conduces to improved organizational performance, such as crisis response capability, organizational planning capability, teamwork spirit, and organizational citizenship. Individual creativity has been the cornerstone and origin of creativity at all levels. For organizations, employee creativity plays a prominent role in organizational innovation and boom. On that account, it is of paramount significance for the survival and boom of companies to probe into driving factors in employee creativity and its mechanism of action so as to motivate employee creativity, which has also become a principal topic for scholars.

Early research on creativity mainly focused on personalities, cognitive processes, lifecycle rules, and individual factors. Nevertheless, creativity is not completely individualized but rather a function of individual and contextual factors. An increasing amount of recent research has begun to explore creativity from the perspective of the interaction between individual factors and contextual ones.

Most researchers usually select certain variables from individual and contextual factors to construct interaction terms, to which the approach can discover the relationship between specific variable combinations and employee creativity, but can hardly explain the relationship between creativity and the interaction between individuals and contexts as a whole. However, the viewpoint of person-environment fit (P-E fit) provides us with a path to explain the interaction between individuals and contexts at large. As the kernel of Organizational Behavioral Science, this viewpoint refers to the consistency, matching, and similarity between the person and the environment . Many studies have concentrated on the relationship between P-E fit and its types and employee attitudes and behaviors, yet few has paid attention to P-E fit and employee creativity, and even few have focused on the positive impact of objective matching on employee creativity. In such case, what impacts will employees' perceived fit create on creativity?

People in different sociocultural environments may present diverse creative expression patterns. In other words, a specific sociocultural environment leads to discrepancies in employee creative activities. Many scholars have analyzed the differences in individual creativity under different cultural backgrounds from a cross-cultural perspective. This cross-cultural perspective holds that, due to different internal structures of diverse cultures, the unity of culture has been exaggerated, whereas the heterogeneity of culture has been ignored; therefore, focusing merely on the comparison of cultural similarities and differences has overlooked the inter-cultural interaction and dynamic process. In that way, nowadays with more and more diversified forms and approaches of cultural interaction, how will people's multicultural experience affect the relationship between person-environment and employee creativity? This is also one of the questions demanding an answer in this study.

Source: Kaiqing Wang and Yijie Wang, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01980/full
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