Feedback-seeking from team members increases employee creativity: the roles of thriving at work and mindfulness

The feedback-seeking literature suggests that acquiring different perspectives from others, individuals would be able to improve their creative performance. However, our understanding of the effect of feedback-seeking is notably underdeveloped since primary research focused mainly on feedback from leaders. Grounded in self-determination theory, the current study proposes a theoretical model for how feedback-seeking from team members is beneficial and can supplement feedback from leaders, and thus can improve employee creativity. Also, we propose that individual traits may be one reason that seeking feedback does not lead to intended creativity. Accordingly, this study suggests a moderated mediation model to examine the roles of thriving at work and mindfulness between feedback-seeking from team members and employee creativity. Based on three-wave-lagged data collected from 351 employees and their leaders, we found that feedback-seeking from team members could promote employee creativity via thriving at work, and the indirect effect of thriving at work was stronger for employees with a higher level of mindfulness.