The effects of work stress on employee creativity based on regulatory focus theory

In today’s highly volatile and uncertain environment, it is becoming increasingly important to drive organizational success and survival, which makes employee creativity more valuable in the workplace. In recent years, scholars and managers have attributed great importance to the improvement of employee creativity. At the same time, in the increasingly fierce market, competition, heavy workloads, and fast-paced environments put heavy pressure on employees. So, under such conditions, how do employees respond to work stress and enhance their creativity? This paper will answer this question. Based on the theory of regulatory focus, this paper explores how work stress (challenge stress and hindrance stress) phases through two different regulatory focuses, which in turn affect employee creativity. The role of participative leadership in the process will also be explored, using the theory of social information processing. A total of 300 questionnaires were distributed in this study, from which 202 valid questionnaires were collected. Data was collected in two-week intervals, to reduce the potential of common biases in methodology and test the causal relationships assumed in this model. A structural equation model, hierarchical regression analysis, and the bootstrapping method were applied to analyze the data from the questionnaire. The research results show that: (1) Challenge stress can induce promotion focus in employees, and hindrance stress can induce prevention focus; (2) Promotion focus plays a role as an intermediary between challenge stress and employee creativity – that is, challenge stress enhances employee creativity by strengthening promotion focus, and prevention focus does not serve as a mediator between hindrance stress and employee creativity; (3) Participative leadership enhances the positive correlation between challenge stress and promotion focus, and plays a regulatory role in this model; (4) Participative leadership weakens the positive correlation between hindrance stress and prevention focus, but does not play a regulatory role in this model. Therefore, this research has important theoretical and practical significance. In theory, although previous studies have focused on the negative effects of stress, some scholars have recently proposed a balanced view of pressure effects by presenting a challenge-hindrance stress framework. First, this paper finds that challenge stress can induce employees’ promotion focus, while hindrance stress can induce their prevention focus, and introduces the two-dimensional challenge-hindrance stress model into the regulatory focus theory, further expanding the scope of the adjustment focus theory. Second, by introducing the two focuses (promotion focus and prevention focus) as the intermediary mechanism linking the two types of work stress (challenge stress and hindrance stress) with employee creativity, we expand the challenge-hindrance stress framework. At the same time, from a new perspective, two types of work stress that have different “black box” impacts on employee creativity were revealed. Third, this paper shows that participative leadership can effectively enhance the positive influence of challenge stress and mitigate the negative influence of hindrance stress on employee creativity, in such a way that contributes to the theory of social information processing. Specifically, this study explores the role of participative leadership in employee stress and regulatory focus from the perspective of interactions between leadership behavior (social sources) and organizational tasks (objective sources). This research helps us to understand the boundary conditions of the two stressors that induce different forms of regulatory focus. Finally, this study combines the theory of regulatory focus with the theory of social information processing. In a practical sense, in order to improve the creativity of employees, organizations should provide employees with appropriate challenge stress and reduce hindrance stress. In addition, leaders should adopt a participative leadership style to enhance the positive influence of challenge stress and mitigate the negative influence of hindrance stress on employee creativity.