Does HRM facilitate employee creativity and organizational innovation? A study of Chinese firms

Abstract

Using a sample of 106 firms in China, we examined how human resource management (HRM) practices relate to employee creativity and organizational innovation. In order to avoid common method bias, the data were collected from three different groups of respondents separately. Our results showed that four HRM practices, hiring and selection, reward, job design and teamwork, were positively related to employee creativaity while training and performance appraisal were not. Employee creativity fully mediated the relationships between those four HRM practices and organizational innovation. Results suggest that HRM practices can play an important role in managing people to promote innovation in Chinese organizations.

Keywords:

• administrative innovation
• employee creativity
• human resource management
• technological innovation

Acknowledgements

This paper has been accepted for presentation at the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, 8–13 August 2008 in Anaheim, CA, USA. The authors would like to thank Prof. Anne Tsui, Assistant Prof. Amy Ou and Prof. Betty Coffey for their very helpful comments on the earlier versions of this manuscript. This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Numbers: 71002080, 70732002 and 71172063) and Humanities and Social Sciences Project of The Education Department of Guangdong Province of China (Project numbers: wym09027).