Fueling creativity: HR practices, work engagement, personality, and autonomy

Although creativity is an important domain of performance in turbulent environments, little research has examined through which underlying mediating mechanism and when HR practices are effective in facilitating creative task performance. Building on the conservation of resources theory, we aimed to (1) investigate whether opportunity-enhancing HR practices were positively linked to employee creativity through work engagement and (2) examine the roles of two new boundary conditions (i.e. proactive personality and work autonomy) in these relationships. To test our predictions, a sample of 282 Dutch employees was surveyed using a three-wave lagged survey design. The findings obtained from regression-based path analyses demonstrated that, as expected, work engagement served as a mediator between HR practices and creativity. Moreover, the results indicated that a proactive personality was found to amplify the positive association between HR practices and work engagement. Additionally, work autonomy was found to amplify both the positive association between work engagement and creativity, as well as the indirect association between HR practices and creativity mediated by work engagement. These findings reveal that organizations can enhance employees’ creative performance by implementing HR practices that empower and involve employees, while simultaneously cultivating work engagement, proactive personality traits, and autonomy in the workplace.