The Effects of Innovation Demands and Rewards on Employees’ Off-the-Job Communication and Creativity

Abstract

<p>Innovation demands and rewards are two main work design features that organizations implement to promote employee creativity. This study argues that these design features can possibly lower creativity and that off-the-job communication using technology (and the subsequent reactions like detachment difficulty and work-home conflict) is the main mechanism. Mixed-level data collected from 235 employees-coworkers over 10 workdays, with two separate surveys being sent on each workday, showed preliminary support for the study premises. The stable conditions of innovation demands and rewards were positively related to daily off-the-job communication, which in turn was negatively related to daily creativity as rated by coworkers. There was also modest evidence that daily off-the-job communication was related to daily creativity via daily detachment difficulty and daily work-home conflict. An important moderator at the between-person level, perceived organizational exchange, was identified. Thus, this study contributes to the creativity literature by unraveling why designing a workplace to encourage employees to display creativity through imposing innovation demands and linking creative outputs to rewards might ironically lower their creativity as a result of promoting daily off-the-job communication.</p>