The effect of informal status on employee creative performance: a moderated mediation model

As an essential factor for sustainable business development, creative performance has received increasing attention from both management and academia. Formal status has been confirmed to affect creative performance positively, but few studies have investigated the mechanisms by which informal status affects creative performance. Based on Status Characteristics Theory, this study introduces career calling and collectivism orientation to investigate the intrinsic mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationship between informal status and employee creative performance. By collecting paired data from 216 employees across three stages, we test our hypotheses using the hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods. Our study verifies that informal status impacts creative performance positively, that career calling partially mediates the relationship between informal status and creative performance, and that collectivism orientation positively moderates the relationship between informal status and career calling and moderates the mediating effect of career calling in this context. By constructing an integrated model of the link between informal status and creative performance, we further enrich and extend related studies.