How does Performance Pressure Promote Employee Creativity? Moderating Role of Leader-Member Exchange

Along with the worsening economic uncertainty and changing world economic development situation, especially the outbreak of COVID-19, the global public health crisis and economic depression, many world-renowned enterprises rapidly ceased to exist. Thousands of organizations are faced with layoffs and collapse. Creativity, as the key ability of organizational leadership and adaptation to the change in the 21st century, may be an important chip for them to survive the crisis. However, while the organization continues to “speed up”, employees also experience greater performance pressure.That is to say, if they meet or exceed the performance expectations, they will get promotion, salary increase and positive evaluation. If they fail to meet the performance expectations, they will be faced with dismissal, punishment and other adverse results. At present, the research on performance pressure is mainly carried out from two angles. From the level of performance pressure, researchers take it as one-dimensional measurement, and there are different views at present; from the nature of performance pressure, researchers take it as a two-dimensional measurement, and the research in this field is relatively lacking. In order to explore the influence mechanism and boundary conditions of performance pressure on employee creativity, 401 employees were investigated and analyzed by Mplus7. The results show that, when performance pressure is assessed as a challenge, it promotes employee creativity from“breadth”through the flexible path, and from“depth”through the continuous path when assessed as a threat. Leader-member exchange has a positive moderating role in both paths. In high-quality leader member exchange, leaders usually provide valuable resources for employees. On the one hand, it is beneficial for employees to actively participate in challenging tasks and experience higher-level domain knowledge, and positive social communication between leaders and employees is conducive to enhancing employees’ cognitive thinking and flexibility; on the other hand, the negative emotions of employees are alleviated, showing a higher level of risk-taking, and the support of leaders is positively rewarded through loyalty, effort and other behaviors beneficial to leaders. By deeply analyzing the different evaluation of performance pressure on employee creativity in different paths, further verifying the impact mechanism and expanding the boundary conditions, we put forward a new perspective for the study of performance pressure, and also provide useful enlightenment for the organization to improve employee creativity.