حمایت سازمانی درک شده، خلاقیت کارکنان و شخصیت پیشگیرانه: اثر واسطه گری مفهوم کار Perceived organizational support, employee creativity and proactive personality: The mediating effect of meaning of work

1. Introduction In today’s competitive business environment, supporting creativity and creating perceived support helps to improve creativity in many organizations (Diliello, Houghton, & Dawley, 2011; Ibrahim, Isab, & Shahbudin, 2016) while also increasing job satisfaction and reducing turnover intention (Cheng, Yang, Wanc, & Chu, 2013). Specifically, creativity involves the generation of new and useful ideas while innovation involves the application of these ideas to new products and processes. The process by which creative ideas are transformed into new products and services is significantly influenced by changes in the external environment (Sarooghi, Libaers, & Burkemper, 2015). Organizations view employee creativity as a source of competitive advantage because it enables employees to increase organizational performance and investigate new processes, techniques or products (Ibrahim et al., 2016). Because a supportive environment for creativity is an important determinant of organizational performance (King, Chermont, West, Dawson, & Hebl, 2007), organizations have to attach importance to creativity. Therefore creativity is an important variable in order to increase organizational performance. However, there is a lack of research about creativity in business environments because creativity is often associated with artistic activities, such as film making, acting, painting, composing music or writing novels and poetry, which are recreational rather than business activities. Empirical research also usually focuses on routine operational tasks and meeting the needs of tourists in hotel organizations (Wong & Ladkin, 2008). However, in order to develop employees’ creative and innovative behaviours in hotel businesses, where communication with customers is essential, the antecedents of these behaviours need to be determined. The dependent and independent variables of this research are as follows: employee creativity, proactive personality, perceived organizational support and meaning of work. Proactive personalities are defined as those who identify and use opportunities and take initiative until a meaningful change is achieved (Crant, 1995). They are also referred to as those who use initiative to improve existing conditions or create new conditions (Crant, 1995). Businesses support innovation to create new conditions, which increases the importance of encouraging, valuing and rewarding businesses for promoting creativity and innovation. Recruiting creative personalities or improving the creativity of employees are two ways of promoting creativity in the workplace (Kandampully, Bilgihan, & Zhang, 2016: 158; Chang & Teng, 2017: 134). Meaning of work is defined as the balance or harmony between the characteristics of the employees and expectations of the employees (Morin & Dassa, 2006), which happens when employees dedicate themselves to a valuable and meaningful job (Steger, 2012). Perceived organizational support is the general belief that the organization care for the contributions and welfare of its employees (Eisenberger et al., 1986). In other words, employees feel secure in their organizations and use the support they have. Many studies in the literature (e.g. Diliello et al., 2011; Ibrahim et al., 2016; Zhou & George, 2001) have shown that high perceived organizational support enhances employee creativity. Joo, Hahn, and Peterson (2015) also found that employees state that they will continue to work in their organizations as long as their organizations care about their well-being and give them important operational tasks (Joo et al., 2015).