组态视角下研发团队新员工创造力激活路径研究

Research on the activation path of new employees′creativity in R&D teams from the perspective of configuration

以高新技术企业研发团队中289位新员工为样本,综合运用组态思维和模糊集定性比较分析法(fsQCA)整合组织、领导与员工等三个层面的五个条件,探索影响新员工创造力的因果复杂机制。研究发现:(1)单一层面的单个条件并不构成产生新员工高创造力的必要条件,但高组织创新支持氛围在产生新员工高创造力上起着较为普遍的作用;(2)新员工高创造力的激活机制分为三条路径:即闭合式领导主导型、开放式领导主导型以及双元式领导主导型。其中,第一条路径指高闭合式领导与高组织创新支持氛围的联动匹配,第二条路径指高开放式领导与高组织创新支持氛围的联动匹配,第三条路径指高开放式领导、高闭合式领导、高组织包容氛围和高组织创新支持氛围的联动匹配;(3)较之闭合式领导主导型和开放式领导主导型,双元式领导主导型更可能有效地激活新员工高创造力;(4)抑制新员工高创造力的原因尚不明确,且与激活新员工高创造力的驱动机制存在非对称性关系。

New employee management is an important issue in human resource management.For a long time,enterprises adopt diversified strategies to help new employees adapt to the organization efficiently.Faced with the highly dynamic and uncertain environment in the era of digital economy,enterprises need employees to constantly innovate in order to identify opportunities and grasp competitive advantages quickly.Newcomer is a kind of"fresh blood"injected into the enterprise,and its natural creative characteristics can bring heterogeneous or even subversive knowledge resources to the organization,which is indispensable in the process of enterprise continuous innovation.However,new employees need to socialize from"outsiders"to"insiders".How to effectively activate the creativity of new employees has become a management hot spot of academic circles and the industry.Previous studies on new employee management focused more on the process of traditional organizational socialization factors on new employee′s job adaptation,but lacking the research on new employee′s creativity.Prior studies have found that organizational factors,employee factors and leadership behavior have a significant effect on new employees′innovation behavior.However,it is mainly limited to a single level of influence mechanism,and lacks the activation mechanism of new employees′creativity in the process of socialization.In view of the current complex and dynamic internal and external environment,innovation ideas involve multiple levels such as organization,leadership and employees,and the effectiveness of activating the creativity of new employees at a single level is facing unprecedented limitations.In addition,previous studies have explored the"net effect"of a single level on the creativity of new employees based on the traditional regression analysis method,which lays a foundation for further understanding the configuration effect of the above three levels of complex interaction.However,in this kind of research,the linear relationship between the three levels and employee creativity is uncertain,and it is difficult to answer the configuration effect of multiple factors(especially more than three factors),and it is unable to dig out a clearer necessary and sufficient causal relationship,so it is impossible to clarify the configuration effect of interdependent antecedents on new employee creativity in the complex process of socialization.In view of this point,in order to systematically deconstruct the combination of antecedents of new employees′creativity activation,this paper adopts the method of fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis(fsQCA),which integrates different factors at different levels into the integration model.It can not only break through the limitations of previous single level analysis,but also systematically explores the causal complexity of the research object,and deeply analyzes the multi-level factors that activate the creativity of new employees.Therefore,this paper takes 289 new employees in the RD teams of high-tech enterprises as samples,and comprehensively uses configuration thinking and qualitative comparative analysis(QCA)to integrate the five conditions of organization,leadership and employees,and explores the multiple concurrent factors and causal complex mechanism to activate the creativity of new employees.The results show that:(1)high organizational support for creativity is the necessary condition to stimulate new employees′high creativity;(2)the activation mechanism of new employees′high creativity can be divided into three paths:closing leadership,opening leadership and ambidextrous leadership.Among them,the first path refers to the linkage and matching of high closing leadership and high organizational support for creativity,the second path refers to the linkage and matching of high opening leadership and high organizational support for creativity,the third path refers to the linkage and matching of high opening leadership,high closing leadership,high organizational support for creativity and high organizational inclusive climate;(3)compared with the closing leadership and opening leadership,ambidextrous leadership is more likely to activate new employees′high creativity;(4)the configuration analysis of the new employees′low creativity shows that there is no stable element linkage matching mode,and there is an asymmetric relationship with the driving mechanism of high creativity.The research contributions are as follows:(1)identify the complex elements that promote the creativity of new employees,and clarify the mechanism of activating the creativity of new employees from the organization,leadership and employee levels,and enhance the applicability of the conclusion;(2)apply the configuration perspective to explore the substitutability and complementarity between different elements in the configuration that activate the creativity of new employees,so as to effectively break through the previous standard system;(3)by using QCA method to explore the inhibition mechanism of high creativity of new employees from the perspective of"causal asymmetry",we can further expand the explanation level of creativity activation of new employees in the context of socialization.This paper not only helps enterprise managers grasp the preconditions accurately for new employees to participate in innovation activities in the complex process of social adaptation,but also provides new management ideas to meet the demands of enterprise sustainable innovation.