Leader Perfectionism—Friend or Foe of Employee Creativity? Locus of Control as a Key Contingency
研究探讨领导者对员工的完美主义如何影响员工创造力，发现这取决于员工的控制点：内控型员工在适度完美主义下创造力提升，但极端时效果减弱；外控型员工则因情绪耗竭而创造力下降。
This research aims to explain whether leader perfectionism toward employees fosters or hinders employee creativity. From a self-regulation perspective, we theorize that depending on employees’ locus of control, leader perfectionism can influence two regulatory states of employees (i.e., engagement and emotional exhaustion) linearly or curvilinearly, which in turn affect their creativity in opposite directions. In a lab experiment and a multisource, multiwave field study, we found that for internals, leader perfectionism had a curvilinear effect on their engagement (but no effect on emotional exhaustion) and subsequent creativity such that the effect was positive but became weaker when leader perfectionism was extreme. By contrast, we found partial support across the two studies that for externals, leader perfectionism had a positive effect on their emotional exhaustion (but no effect on engagement), which undermined their creativity. We discuss the theoretical contributions of this research and its practical implications for organizations.