Empowerment for Creativity in Higher Education: Testing Mental Well-Being and Workplace Fun as Mechanisms
Keywords:
Psychological Empowerment, Mental Well-Being, Workplace Fun, Conservation of Resources TheoryAbstract
The work creativity of employees is becoming more critical to the higher education institutions (HEIs) in terms of the increased competition, limited resources, and increased demands on the teaching and research output. Based on the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory, this paper focuses on the hypothesis that psychological empowerment is a predictor of the work creativity of employees and the relationship between them is mediated by employee mental well-being and relies on workplace fun. In this study, the cross-sectional survey design was used to collect data based on 299 faculty members in the Anhui University, Hefei, China. Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) in SmartPLS was utilized to test the hypothesized model, the reliability and validity of the model were evaluated, and the bootstrapped structural path testing was conducted. The findings indicate that psychological empowerment is a major positive factor influencing employee work creativity (b= 0.180, p<.001). Psychological empowerment also has a positive relationship with employee mental well-being (b= 0.137, p= 0.016), mental well-being positively correlates with work creativity (b= 0.175, p=.001). Nevertheless, the mediated effect of empowerment on creativity via mental well-being, is not statistically significant (b= 0.026, p=.081), which suggests that empowerment has an impact on creativity via a direct path and/or other proximate means. The result of the interaction analysis reveals that workplace fun enhances the relationship between empowerment and well-being considerably (b= 0.102, p =.050). The results identify the relevance of empowerment-based management practices and favorable work environments in cultivating creativity in HEIs, and recommend the possibility that well-being is not the only avenue by which empowerment can be turned into creativity in the same scenario.
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