Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Creativity is the development of beneficial and new ideas about products/services, procedures and practices (Shalley et al., 2004). Employee creativity (EC) -a.k.a. employee creative-performance- refers to employees coming-up with new, useful ideas (Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Tang et al., 2017). Empirical evidence suggests that EC has a positive influence on many desirable outcomes for an organization such as: organizational innovation (e.g. Chaubey et al., 2019), and performance (e.g. Imran et al., 2018). More so, several scholars (e.g. Kanter, 1983; Oldham and Cummings, 1996) agree that EC is important for obtaining an advantage over competitors. Given these notions reflecting the importance of EC, many researchers have attempted to identify its determinants. One literature that contributed to identifying such determinants is that examining the relationships between systems of human resource management practices (HRMPs) and EC. HRMPs systems include: high-performance, high-commitment, and high-involvement practices (Lepak et al., 2006). However, this literature has limitations. One is its relative scarcity compared to other literatures highlighting the contextual and individual factors affecting EC (Shin et al., 2018). For example, in relation to ‘high-performance’ human resource practices which refer to HRMPs producing superior performance (Boxall and Macky, 2009), Chiang et al., (2015) notes that little research has examined the relation between these practices and EC. Similarly, in relation to ‘high-involvement’ human resource practices (HIHRPs), which refer to HRMPs enhancing employees’ involvement (Yang, 2012), even fewer studies (e.g. Shin et al., 2018; Song et al., 2019) examined the relation between HIHRPs and EC. Moreover, the scarce research examining the mechanisms between HRMPs and employee outcomes (Shen et al., 2014) such as EC is another limitation. Shin et al. (2018) implied this limitation in the field by noting that there still remains the unsettled issue of explaining the ‘how’ aspect regarding relationships between HRMPs and employee outcomes. Similarly, Boxall et al. (2019) argued for the importance of examining how HRMPs influence employee and organizational outcomes. Thus, such arguments highlight the need for more research examining the mediators that help explain the relationship between HRMPs and EC.