| dc.description.abstract | Insurance companies in China, characterized by a hierarchical structure, face fierce competition in grabbing the market share. Hence, innovation has been settled as a corporate strategy and simultaneously employees are expected to get more involved in the creative process or creative work. But, does organizational centralization, one prevalent characteristic of insurance firms in China, impact employee involvement in creative work? If so, how? To answer this question, the study attempted to examine the association between organizational centralization and creative work involvement from a psychological view. Ultimately, the assumption that organizational centralization might influence employee creative work involvement by influencing employees’ psychological safety was postulated. To test this assumption, this study adopted a mediation analysis in the software AMOS with collected data from 711 employees who are working for insurance companies in China. Results suggest that psychological safety fully mediates the relationship between organizational centralization and creative work involvement. Specifically, organizational centralization is positively associated with psychological safety, which, in turn, is positively associated with employee creative work involvement. By assessing the influence of one dimension of organizational structure (organizational centralization) on employees’ psychological condition (psychological safety), this study enriched the theory of hierarchy and organizational innovation. Simultaneously, it also offered practical implications for organizational management regarding the importance of building a psychologically safe work environment for employees’ involvement in creative work. This study empirically verified that psychological safety plays an important and positive role in creative work involvement. Surprisingly, it is inconsistent with the assertion in many previous studies that organizational centralization negatively influences psychological safety. Cautions should be paid to the interpretation and generalization of the results because of some limitations. | |
