A multilevel perspective of developmental feedback and employee creativity

Abstract

Drawing from the broader feedback literature and the creativity literature, we offer a multilevel perspective to examine how receiving developmental feedback could positively influence one’s creativity. We resolve a key puzzle in the feedback–creativity literature—why feedback sometimes predicts creativity and sometimes does not—by theorizing developmental feedback as a multilevel system rather than a single-source input. Integrating supervisor and team developmental feedback shows that creativity emerges when developmental cues align across levels to facilitate early-stage problem identification, thereby advancing creativity theory from outcome explanations to process-based accounts. We identified both individual-level and team-level mediating mechanisms linking developmental feedback to creativity. We collected data from a large telecommunication company in China. Hierarchical linear modeling results based on 642 employees nested in 103 teams functioning in four areas supported our hypotheses. Both supervisor developmental feedback (SDF) and team developmental feedback (TDF) were positively related to employee creativity. Employees’ problem identification mediated the relationship between SDF and creativity, while team reflexivity mediated the relationship between SDF and problem identification as well as creativity. Our findings suggest that developmental feedback that is informational, motivational, and future-oriented in nature from one’s supervisor and the team contributes to the generation of both novel and useful ideas. We also discuss implications for research and address the limitations of this research.