From Empowerment to Multilevel Creativity: The Role of Employee Self

Employees’ perception of their intrateam status plays an important role in the leader–member interaction process. Combining relational fairness theory and status theory, the present study reveals how leadership empowerment behavior (LEB) affects employee and team creativity. Specifically, we propose that LEB may increase employee creativity by elevating employee self-perceived status and enhance team creativity through fostering a feedback-seeking climate in the team. Moreover, we propose that, at the team level, team status conflict moderates the relationship between LEB and feedback-seeking climate such that LEB is only positively related to feedback-seeking climate when status conflict is low but not when it is high. We further propose that team feedback-seeking climate also mediates the interactive effect of LEB and status conflict on team creativity. Results based on data collected from a sample of 84 teams with 392 employees supported our hypotheses. We also discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and propose future research directions