78 Chapter 4 creativity with a weekly follow-up study and aim to show that employees can influence their own creativity, from week to week. The design of our study implies that we do not have complete control over causality. However, we will control for previous levels of the mediator and dependent variables in the analyses. When we refer to a causal or mediation relationship in this article, the reader should be aware that causality is assumed and cannot be claimed. Finally, we contribute to the goal setting and goal orientation literatures by investigating how goal orientation, as a motivational moderator variable, influences this creativity process. Since goal orientation determines employees’ self-regulatory tactics, including their effort, persistence, and learning strategies (Brett, Uhl-Bien, Huang, & Carsten, 2016), goal orientation potentially has important implications for how proactive vitality management is related to work engagement and how engagement is related to creativity. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In a highly competitive business world where the rate of change has been accelerating, organizations constantly need new ways to create value for their customers. Therefore, modern organizations are interested in creativity and newmethods to facilitate creative performance. Creativity refers to the generation of ideas, insights, or problem solutions that are both novel and potentially useful (Amabile, 1997; Anderson, De Dreu, & Nijstad, 2004). Research suggests that organizations can stimulate creativity by structural interventions. For example, organizational factors like support for innovation, job complexity, climate for excellence, and supervisor empowerment are positively related to creativity (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014). Thus, managers could presumably follow a top-down approach and stimulate creativity by designing resourceful and challenging jobs that signal an innovation climate. In addition, research has revealed that personality factors like openness to experience and proactive personality are positively related to creativity (Feist, 1998; Ma, 2009). This suggests that managers could also stimulate creativity by implementing adequate personnel selection procedures. It is important to note that personality and work environments are able to predict creativity, but that more proximal predictors are needed in order to explain how personal and environmental characteristics influence creativity. Daniels (2006) has
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw