The effects of job involvement and supervisor developmental feedback on employee creativity: A polynomial regression with response surface analysis

This paper aims to explore how job involvement and supervisor developmental feedback (SDF) interact to affect employee creativity. Through the lens of person-supervisor fit theory, we employed polynomial regression with response surface analysis to map the interconnections between job involvement, SDF, and creativity. We conducted two independent studies to investigate the relationship. In the first study, we analyzed 389 MBA students’ (former and current) responses from a large university in China and in the second study, we surveyed 392 full time employees from a high-technology company. The two studies confirmed a dynamic relationship among these three variables (i.e., job involvement, SDF, and creativity). The polynomial regression results indicated that employee creativity peaks when job involvement and SDF are both high. In addition, when job involvement is low but SDF is high, or vice versa, employee creativity is at a high level as well.