Creative self-efficacy and creative performance: Understanding the underlying mechanisms

Research has highlighted the importance of creative self-efficacy for creative performance, yet relatively little is known about how and when creative self- efficacy relates to creative performance. To advance the literature and provide a more nuanced understanding of this relationship, we use social cognitive theory to develop and test a model that identifies thriving at work as an important mediating mechanism, and perceived work significance and perceived task interdependence as key moderators that enhance the positive creative self-efficacy to creative performance relationship. Specifically, we analyze a multi-source dataset–collected from 795 employees and 149 supervisors at two different time periods–while controlling for authoritarian leadership, group members’ job position, firm type, conscientiousness, and prior task performance. Our findings show that thriving at work partially mediates the relationship between creative self-efficacy and creative performance. Our results also demonstrate that perceived work significance and task interdependence individually and jointly moderate the creative self- efficacy–creative performance relationship such that the positive relationship is more prominent when both perceived work significance and task interdependence are high rather than low.