Facilitating or Hindering? The Impact of Employee Perceptions of Digital Technology on Digital Creativity

As an emerging employee creativity under the revolutionary breakthrough of digital technology (DT), the formation of digital creativity not only requires organizations to provide DT to employees, but also depends on their own perception of DT. Due to DT puts heavy pressure on the career development of employees, some evidence suggests that they may have different perceptions towards the DT. However, research on consequences of employee DT perceptions has mostly neglected to distinguish them. Drawing on transactional theory of stress and Kurt Lewin’s field theory, we develop a novel model explaining how differentiated state of DT perception affects employees' digital creativity. Through a multi-wave, multi-source survey of 451 leader-employee dyads, our study unveil that employee DT opportunity perception positively affects digital creativity, and employee DT threat perception negatively affects digital creativity; promotion-oriented job crafting plays a partially mediating role in the relationship between employee DT opportunity perception and digital creativity, and Prevention-oriented job crafting plays a partially mediating role in the relationship between employee DT threat perception and digital creativity; digital technology self-efficacy plays a moderating role in this process mechanism. The findings deepen employees' understanding of digital technology, and provides insights to business innovation.