The Effect of Psychological Collectivism on Creative Work Involvement: The Role of Prosocial Motivation and Leadership Style

Collectivism is a common concept in the cultural study, which is used to describe a community whose motivation and emphasis are strongly tight to collective perspective. Considering previous research’s suggestions on another level of analysis of collectivism, and limitations of the culturalbased view of collectivism in studying organizational behaviors, this thesis examined collectivism at the individual level as a personality trait, termed psychological collectivism. Prior research investigated several outcomes of psychological collectivism. Out of them, creative work involvement has been neglected. Given the importance of innovation process, in which creative engagement is essential, in the current knowledge-based economy, and advantages of the collective attitude in facilitating group-based project works, the relationship between psychological collectivism and creative work involvement should be explored. This thesis objective is to study (1) the effect of psychological collectivism on creative work involvement, (2) the mediating role of prosocial motivation in this relationship, and (3) the moderating effect of three different leadership styles (i.e. transformational leadership, transactional leadership, laissez-faire) on the psychological collectivism-creative work involvement relationship. To address these objectives, this thesis utilized quantitative approach. A sample of 167 organizational members working in different organizations was studied. The data were collected by the online web-based questionnaire, and all the variables were measured at the same point of time. After that, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) method is used to analyzed the data. The results indicated that psychological collectivism is positively related to creative work involvement; prosocial motivation partially mediates this relationship; transactional leadership marginally weakens the psychological collectivism-creative work involvement relationship; whereas, transformational leadership and laissez-faire show no significant moderating effect. The research findings suggested that employees who have a stronger orientation to work in groups will devote more time and effort to creative processes associated with work, and one of the mechanisms explained this motive is through employee’s motivation to help others. Also, leaders who strongly emphasize on results, and use rewards as motivators for employees’ job accomplishment may undermine their willingness to carry out creative activities. These make several implications for management practices such as a proper human resource allocation for innovation projects, customized training programs, and suitable leadership behaviors to different groups of employees.