نوآوری اکتشافی، نوآوری مشارکتی و خلاقیت کارکنان: اعتدال جمع گرایی در زمینه چینی Exploratory innovation, exploitative innovation and employee creativity: The moderation of collectivism in Chinese context

1. Introduction China has tremendously developed economically in nearly four decades, since the transition from a planned to market economy. Since the early 1990s, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) has grown enormously that it exceeded Germany in 2007 and Japan in 2010, thereby becoming one of the largest economies in the world second only to the USA[1]. There is no doubt that innovation has played a vital role in China’s economic growth, which has shifted the country from a world factory that produced low-value added products to the most innovative economy significantly producing high value-added products (Zhang et al., 2012). China’s ranking of the Global Innovation Index[2] has steadily risen from 35 in 2013 to 22 in 2017[3]. It is currently the only middle-income country that is ranked among the top 25 innovative industrialized and developed countries. The surge in China’s economy has been explained in different ways. While environmental factors such as the growth of foreign direct investment (Hu and Jefferson, 2009) and government subsidies (Li, 2012) are the major reasons, creative talent of individuals has not only contributed to China’s rapid development to date, but will also further innovation in China. Hence, our main research question is: RQ1. What can help develop creative talents in China? Individual creativity can be perceived as a function of individual traits, such as cognitive capabilities, personality and upbringing, and contextual factors, such as their cultural and organizational backgrounds (Hahn et al., 2015; Oldham and Cummings, 1996). In this study, we mainly focus on contextual factors that can affect individual creativity, which has recently gained attention. The effects of organizational and cultural factors on individual creativity are examined, provided the facts that individuals spend most of their lifetime in various working organizations and that they are embedded in and profoundly influenced by their national cultural background. Specifically, we explore the relationship between organizational innovation activities and employee creativity, and the moderating effect of collectivism – a prominent dimension of the Chinese culture. We are interested in the effects of organizational innovation on employee creativity for three reasons. First, even though it has been well established that employee creativity can be shaped by organizational context (Oldham and Cummings, 1996), less is known about whether and how it can be fostered and nurtured in organizations that are engaged in various innovation activities. Second, most of the previous studies that examined the relationship between creativity and innovation often at one specific level of analysis and rarely has there been cross-level research on this relationship (Anderson et al., 2014; Sarooghi et al., 2015). Third, it is intuitive and often assumed that the creativity–innovation relationship is unidirectional that creative employees precede organizational innovation (Anderson et al., 2014; Valaei et al., 2017); recently, some have researchers proposed a theoretical model of creativity–innovation cycle (Paulus, 2002; Lee et al., 2007). While there has been some preliminary evidence from case studies that organizational innovation does contribute to the development of employee creativity (Lee et al., 2007), systematic examination using quantitative methods is still lacking.