Supportive supervision and doctoral student creativity: the double-edged sword of family support

ABSTRACTDoctoral student creativity is critical for technological innovation and knowledge production. Based on the extended scientific and technical human capital (STHC) theory, a moderated mediation model was constructed to explore how supportive supervision is associated with doctoral student creativity through the simultaneous mediating effects of academic buoyancy and network ties and the moderating role of family support. A sample of 637 doctoral students from China participated in this study. In particular, the findings suggest that supportive supervision is positively related to doctoral student creativity through the simultaneous indirect effects of both academic buoyancy and network ties, while the mediating effect of academic buoyancy is stronger than that of network ties. Moreover, the significant moderation effect of family support on the relationship between network ties, academic buoyancy, and creativity reveals that students with greater family support are more likely to benefit from the academic buoyancy while leading the mediating effect of network ties to be dispensable, implying that family support can be a double-edged sword. The findings provide implications for supervision that can improve doctoral student creativity by attaching importance to social capital and psychological capital while considering the nuanced influence that family support may exert.KEYWORDS: Supportive supervisionacademic buoyancynetwork tiesdoctoral student creativityfamily support Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Author contributionsAll authors contributed to the study conception and design. Conceptualization, material preparation and formal analysis were performed by Ying Zhang. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Ying Zhang and Shuiyun Liu, and all other authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.Data availabilityThe datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.Additional informationFundingThe research leading to these results received funding from [Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education of China] under Grant Agreement No [22YJA880030] and [Capital University of Economics and Business] under Grant Agreement No [XRZ2022012].