Creativity in the customer era: the mediating role of job stress
研究下属感知的领导客户导向对员工创造力的影响，发现工作压力（挑战性/阻碍性压力）起中介作用，基于377名员工和81名主管的公共部门数据。
The fast-paced changes involving organizations requires leaders and subordinates in private and public organizations to generate new and useful ideas for products, services, and procedures more effectively to quickly and efficiently meet customers’ and citizens’ demands. This study is innovative in exploring subordinates’ perceptions of leader’s customer orientation as an antecedent of employee creativity, considering the mediating role of job stress (challenge/hindrance stress). To test the model, we draw on a sample of 377 employees and 81 supervisors from the public sector. We find that leaders’ customer orientation, as perceived by subordinates, has a positive direct relationship with creativity and, surprisingly, a negative one through job stress. We also observe that subordinates’ perceptions of leaders’ customer orientation appear to mitigate hindrance stress and, unexpectedly, challenge stress. The results provide novel theoretical and practical insights on how work dynamics can be managed to improve creativity.