Steelman et al.’s (2004) deem that the feedback environment is composed of seven facets: source credibility, feedback quality, feedback delivery, favorable feedback and unfavorable feedback accurately reflecting performance, source availability, and support for feedback seeking. Source credibility is conceptualized as the feedback source’s expertise and trustworthiness. Consistency and usefulness have been demonstrated to be important aspects of feedback quality. A feedback recipient’s perceptions of the source’s intentions in giving feedback will affect his or her reactions and responses to the feedback. Favorable/unfavorable feedback is conceptualized as the perceived frequency of positive/negative feedback when, from the feedback recipient’s view, his or her performance does in fact warrant positive/negative feedback. Supervisor source availability is operationalized as the perceived amount of contact an employee has with his or her supervisor and/or coworkers and the ease with which feedback can be obtained. Feedback-seeking promotion is defined as the extent to which the environment is supportive or unsupportive of feedback seeking (Rosen et al., 2006). The combination of the facets is thought to reflect a balanced feedback environment. These seven dimensions constitute a highly supportive feedback environment (Whitaker et al., 2007), which could make the employees feel appreciated and cultivate the support of leadership. Such support may motivate employees to approach their work in a more positive way, and increase the salience of the information and the importance of the feedback process (Jennifer and Sabine, 2008). Additionally, with the source of the feedback environment, feedback is further divided into two key feedback sources, coworkers and supervisors. Considering the coworkers and supervisors, the supervisors play a bigger role in influencing creative performance (George and Zhou, 2007). In the current study, we put the supervisor feedback environment to the fundamental position, similar to previous studies (Norris-Watts and Levy, 2004; Anseel and Lievens, 2007). A case can be made for an intimate link between this conceptualization of supervisor supportive feedback environment and creative performance for the following two reasons.

First, the primary literature has shown that some dimensions of the feedback environment influence the employees’ creative performance. For instance, with regard to feedback delivery, research has indicated that if feedback is delivered supportively, then the purpose for informing employees about their contribution is more apparent; thus, the likelihood of improving creative performance is increased (Zhou, 1998). Regarding the validity of feedback, it is important to provide the staff with available and valuable cues to learn, develop and improve performance in the job (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996). However, Steelman et al.’s (2004) definition of favorable and unfavorable feedback provides a precise measurement of the employees’ perception. Based on their research, even veridical shady feedback is positively associated with feedback and with the notion of implementing feedback to improve performance. These results imply that both favorable and unfavorable genuine feedback, with the role of facets of the feedback environment, will stimulate employee creativity. Most literature points out that the quality of feedback is the core dimension of feedback environment.

Second, an upstanding feedback environment is both supportive and incentivizing (Sparr and Sonnentag, 2008), which improves creative performance (Zhou and Shalley, 2008). In supportive feedback environment, employees can better clarify performance standards according to the requirements of organization with less uncertainty and ambiguity (Kim et al., 2010). Concretely speaking, a favorable feedback environment could entitle the employees with the feeling of being appreciated and then cultivate the support of leadership (Sparr and Sonnentag, 2008). Such support may foster and promote employees to approach their work creatively. Indeed, a substantial finding within the creativity literature is the value of a positive and stimulating work environment (Zhou and Shalley, 2008). Consistently, in the laboratory and field research, a positive and stimulating work environment is connected with creativity (Baer et al., 2003), and a non-supportive or a dominant work environment is negatively associated with creativity (Madjar et al., 2002; Zhou, 2003). Such support can originate from a variety of sources, such as supportive leadership (e.g., Shin and Zhou, 2003; Tierney and Farmer, 2004). Considering the above arguments, we offer the following assumption:

In view of the SDT (Ryan and Deci, 2000), goal self-concordance just means the extrinsic motivation degree of internalization. Goal self-concordance refers to the integration extent to which individuals set goals with their intrinsic interest and value, which is usually specified by intrinsic motivation, adding internalized extrinsic motivation and then subtracting controlling extrinsic motivation. This is a new construction of integrating internal motivation and external motivation influences, which helps to resolve the confusing divergence about the relationship between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation. Self-concordance indicates the phenomenon that if employees seek their work goals with a sense of self-determination, rather than with a feeling of obligation, they can achieve their work destination as they identify with these objectives or view these objectives as highly interesting and favorable (Sheldon and Elliot, 1999). Building on the theoretical analysis, two arguments can explain why the supervisor feedback environment influences goal self-concordance.

First, goal self-concordance refers to a broad continuum of goal-based motivations, which integrates the internal and external motivations, assesses the degree to which internalization of work goals arrive, and assimilates the extent of self-goals. SDT acknowledges that an individual’s behavior is not purely motivated by intrinsic elements (Ryan and Deci, 2000), and it is incomplete to study creative performance only from an intrinsic motivation angle. That is to say, goal self-concordance could interpret the motivational mechanism produced by creative performance, and such self-concordance might supply a more realistic and accurate motivational measure than only considering the intrinsic motivation (Davidson and De Stobbeleir, 2011).

Second, SDT suggests that feedback could promote the internalization of employees, followed by goal self-concordance (Ryan and Deci, 2000). The feedback environment could affect the employee goal self-concordance. Informational guides could lead employees to internalize their work goals and assume that these goals are in self-concordance. Employees in the high-level feedback environment express much more feedback seeking need and continuously make valuable decisions in a supportive and friendly communicative way, which develops a sense of ownership at work (Sparr and Sonnentag, 2008). A high-quality feedback environment entitles employees with tactical relevant information to accomplish goal progress, which can foster their intrinsic interest and encourage employees to concentrate their attention on work goals rather than on external worries and concerns (Zhou, 2003). Supportive feedback environment can provide the information and strategies for employees to accomplish work tasks. This environment could increase employees’ interest in work and help them focus more attention on work goals instead of being worried and concerned about other external factors (Steelman et al., 2004).

At last, employees could not only appreciate the messages to finish tasks but also sense its significant meaning in the favorable feedback environment. This type of supportive and encouraging behavior includes the following actions: offering useful suggestions, monitoring the employees’ feelings when receiving supervisor feedback, letting the employees know that their work is acknowledged, and responding rapidly (Steelman et al., 2004). In short, a constructive and informative feedback environment advances the internalization of work goals (Zhou and George, 2001).

Previous studies have shown that employees’ level of goal self-concordance is related to their happiness, job satisfaction, and performance (Sheldon and Elliot, 1999; Sheldon and Houser-Marko, 2001; Bono and Judge, 2003; Miquelon and Vallerand, 2008). Bono and Judge (2003) found that the more self-concordant work goals individuals demonstrate, the more initiative the work represents and the better the creative performance is. Building on this theoretical analysis, two arguments can explain why self-concordance affects creative performance.

First, as Sheldon and Elliot (1999) noted, a core characteristic of self-concordance is that employees feel ownership in their goals. Self-concordant goals express employees’ developing interests and intrinsic values; thus, employees feel responsible for these goals and are stimulated to spare no efforts to pursue their goals (Sheldon and Elliot, 1999; Ryan and Deci, 2000). Therefore, individuals who continuously strive for self-concordant goals are more likely to show solicitude for their goals and spare no efforts in pursuing them, which are two preconditions for creative performance (Zhou and Shalley, 2008).

Furthermore, it is easier for individuals to find some alternatives to solve problems when they pursue self-concordant work goals, such as using non-traditional approaches to solve their work problems, which leads to more creativity (Zhou and Shalley, 2008). For example, research has shown that individuals who pursue goals that are consistent with their interior interests and values are able to be more flexible, while individuals who display more external reasons in work activity tend to take on more rigid cognition (Deci and Ryan, 1987). On the basis of these arguments, we suppose the following:

Building on the arguments for the above two assumptions and the empirical evidence about how self-concordance affects creative performance in contextual factors (Bono and Judge, 2003), goal self-concordance could play a mediate role when the supervisor feedback environment influences creative performance. It is perceived that when employees apperceive their supervisors to offer them useful, credible and supportive responses to feedback-seeking behavior, they are inclined to be more responsible and take ownership of the targets. Improving goal self-concordance could stimulate individuals to strive for work and be more flexible to cognize work, which will lead to individuals exhibiting superior creative performance.

According to Field theory, behavior is a function of the individual and the psychological environment, and the mechanism of how the feedback environment impacts creative performance should consider individual differences. Creative personality is an integrated structure that unifies intelligence factors and non-intellectual factors, which determines people’s creativity. Prior research has shown that creative personality and context factors interact to influence the creative performance of the staff (Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Zhou and George, 2001). Oldham and Cummings (1996) examine the mutual influence of employees’ creativity and creative performance in the two characteristics of the organizational context, which are job complexity and supportive supervision, with the conclusion that the employees represent the maximum creativity when taking on complex and challenging assignments with supportive and non-controlling supervision. George and Zhou (2001) found that participants with superior patent personality display a high-level creativity after receiving positive leadership feedback and luminous tasks, and job holders with inferior creative personality perform at a higher-level of creativity if the executive behavior is less controlling. The above results indicate that the personality of the staff influences their reaction to social environmental factors, and the diverse environmental features interact with the employees’ creativity.

Sternberg and Lubart (1996) state that individuals with high creative personality can adapt to uncertain situations; as they encounter difficulties, they can assume a reasonable level of risk and continue to progress. They usually have higher self-confidence, stronger intrinsic motivation, and the resolute desire to be recognized and will work hard to get recognition (Sternberg and Lubart, 1996). A supportive work environment makes employees feel valued and as if they are taken seriously by their supervisor (Sparr and Sonnentag, 2008). Research on the role of feedback on creativity has already shown that creative personality is an important moderator of the feedback-creativity relationship. For example, Zhou and Shalley (2008) showed developmental feedback and creative personality on the creative performance. The highest creative performances were exhibited when individuals receive developmental feedback and had a creative personality. In addition, in the feedback literature, Ilgen et al. (1979) argue that, apart from feedback, personality is an important condition to promote internalization of work assignments. For creative performance, creative personality would predict creativity through intrinsic motivation in combination with other factors such as social support in a complex way but which could be modeled (Sternberg and Lubart, 1996). Therefore, for employees with a high creative personality, a supportive feedback environment would meet the needs of the desire to be recognized and will further promote effort to do more work. Basic psychological needs theory suggests that when environmental factors fulfill psychological needs, the internalization of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation will be promoted, thus contributing to the behavior of individuals.

We have developed moderated mediation hypotheses for supervisor feedback environment and build up our research model (Figure 1).

A convenience sampling of 172 supervisor-subordinate dyads from nine industrial enterprises based in Beijing, China. The entire sample is Chinese. The firm’s HR manager helped collect the data by preparing a list of randomly selected employees (172) and their supervisors (25), on average one supervisor evaluated nearly seven employees. Employees and their supervisors provided data on separate questionnaires and on different occasions.

To avoid common method bias, data were collected from two sources: the employees and their supervisors. The employees filled out a questionnaire that included items measuring the independent variables, mediation variables, demographics, his or her name and supervisor’s name. In a separate questionnaire, each employee’s supervisor rated the employee’s creativity. The supervisors assigned to complete the rating forms were those who had plenty of opportunity to observe their employees’ creative performance.

We assigned an identification number to each employee and his or her supervisors to match the employee questionnaires with the responses of their supervisors. They completed the questionnaires during their work hours and then returned them. One hundred and sixty-two usable dyads were returned, giving a response rate of 94%. Demographic information indicated that there were 95 male employees (58.6%) and 67 female managers (41.4%) in the sample. More than half of the employees were 20-30 years of age, 95% of the participants were under 40 years old; 56% of the participants held a bachelor’s degree or above; 63% of the participants worked for less than 3 years, 81% had worked for less than 5 years.

This study was reviewed and approved by of American Psychological Association Ethics Committee Rules and Procedures, APA Ethics Committee with written informed consent from all participants. All participants gave written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

The measure items used in the present study were primarily developed in English; thus, to ensure cross-linguistic equivalence, we translated all scale items into Chinese and then translated them back into English by means of two bilingual (English–Chinese) professional translators (Brislin, 1980).

The 30-item Creative Personality Scale (Gough, 1979) of the Adjective Check List (ACL) (Gough and Heilbrun, 1965) was used to assess employees’ creativity-relevant personal characteristics. Employees were asked to “place a check mark next to each adjective that you think describes you.” Of the 30 adjectives, 18 describe highly creative people: capable, clever, confident, egotistical, humorous, informal, individualistic, insightful, intelligent, interests wide, inventive, original, reflective, resourceful, self-confident, sexy, snobbish, and unconventional. Each of these checked adjectives was given a value of +1. The remaining 12 adjectives describe less creative people: cautious, commonplace, conservative, conventional, dissatisfied, honest, interests narrow, mannerly, sincere, submissive, suspicious, and phony. Each of these checked adjectives was assigned a value of -1. The values were then summed to form a creative personality index. The Cronbach’s α for the measure of creative personality was 0.70.

Consistent with prior studies, we used supervisor ratings to assess employees’ creative performance (Zhou, 1998; Zhou and George, 2001). Using 13 items each supervisor rated how often their subordinates displayed creative behavior in the workplace on a 5-point scale ranging from never to always. A sample item taken from the scale reads “Seeks out new technologies, processes, techniques and/or product ideas.” The Cronbach’s α for the measure of creative performance was 0.75.

Consistent with previous creativity research (e.g., Zhou and George, 2001; Shalley et al., 2004), we controlled for demographic variables that have been found to be significantly related to creativity: age, gender, job tenure, and education.

The present study advances several perspectives of previous studies. First, our exploration of the impact on burnout of feedback as a multi-dimensional variable helps resolve the inconsistencies of previous studies resulting from only considering feedback from single dimension. Our assumption that employees’ perceptions of the expanded feedback environment indirectly influence their creative performance emphasizes the relevance of studying more aggregate psychological feedback context within the creativity domain. Traditionally, the literature on the feedback-creativity relationship has focused on the effect of specific feedback components, such as feedback valence and feedback delivery, on creative performance (Zhou, 1998, 2003; George and Zhou, 2001; Zhou and George, 2001). The shift of the present study toward a more comprehensive conceptualization of feedback is in line with a recent trend within the feedback literature, which increasingly looks at the broader psychological feedback context in which feedback interventions take place (e.g., Herold and Parsons, 1985; Ashford and Northcraft, 2003; Levy and Williams, 2004; Steelman et al., 2004; Anseel and Lievens, 2007).

Second, our results add to the creativity literature by identifying goal self-concordance as a mediating mechanism between perceptions of a favorable supervisor feedback environment and creative performance. While prior theorizing within the creativity and the feedback–creativity domain has focused on intrinsic motivation as a motivational mechanism between contextual factors and creative performance (Shalley et al., 2004), empirical research on the mediating role of intrinsic motivation has yielded inconsistent results (Shalley and Perry-Smith, 2001; Shin and Zhou, 2003). In response to these inconsistent results, Shalley et al. (2004) suggested that contextual characteristics may not only affect creativity via intrinsic motivation but also via a number of alternative mechanisms. The present study indicates that goal self-concordance, which provides a more balanced view on motivation, can be such an additional mechanism. Our findings provides further support for Bono and Judge’s (2003) findings that contextual factors, such as a favorable feedback environment, influence the extent to which individuals perceive their work activities to be aligned with their authentic interests and values, and that when individuals do have such perceptions, they are likely to display a higher level of creativity throughout their goal striving.

Third, by introducing creative personality as a moderator of the mediated feedback-creativity relationship, this study sheds light on an important boundary condition that strengthens the relationship between feedback and creativity. While these findings are in line with previous research by George and Zhou (2001) our model extends beyond that study, in that we examined creative personality as a moderator to the mediated relationship between supervisor feedback environment, goal self-concordance and creative performance rather than as a moderator to the direct relationship between feedback and creativity. As hypothesized, the highest level of goal self-concordance was found for the supportive feedback environment and high creative personality condition, but for employee who has low level of creative personality this effect is not significant. This finding reveals that certain types of employees are more susceptible to supervisor feedback environment. Moreover, the study’s moderated mediation results have underscored the importance of creating supportive supervisor feedback environment for employee who has creative personality. Our research efforts might further prior understand with regard to the factors that impact creative performance by including relevant additional variables. Some researchers are considering the increased interest in the interplay of personal and contextual characteristics (Shalley et al., 2004; Zhou and Shalley, 2008), they think it might be valuable to investigate how personal characteristics relevant to creativity, such as personality, cognitive style and creative role identity, interact with perceptions of the feedback environment. Indeed, prior research suggests that personal characteristics do influence the way individuals respond to contextual factors (Tierney et al., 1999; Baer et al., 2003). Somewhat surprisingly, however, the conditional indirect effect of supervisor feedback environment was stronger and significant in the high creative personality and in moderate level of creative personality, but was stronger and not significant in the low creative personality condition. In order to explain this finding, we build on previous theoretical suggestions (e.g., Ilgen et al., 1979) in proposing that even high-quality feedback considerately delivered by credible and available supervisors might not satisfy their psychological need and catch goal self-concordance if employees do not have creative personality. This lack of creative personality might in fact not only prevent employees from taking ownership of their goals and integrate them into themselves, but this might also create frustration and increases the feeling that one lacks personal psychological need satisfaction resulting in lower levels of self-concordance.

Finally, The results also have some contribution to SDT. SDT proposes that people who are high in the autonomous causality orientation tend to be more autonomously motivated in a particular situation and to show positive performance and well-being outcomes, but rarely research test whether this orientation would influence creative performance through goal self-concordance. Different goals need different trains. In the creativity literature, Zhou and Shalley (2008) found creative personality correlated with creative performance. In the present research, we built upon this earlier literature and found creative personality can influence goal self-concordance and then influence creative performance, like Oldham and Cummings (1996) found that creative performance was highest when employee had appropriate creativity-relevant characteristics and worked in complex jobs with supportive and no controlling supervision. Individuals with high creative personality might be identified through use of assessment instruments (Gough, 1979) such as the feedback environment and the normative baselines that accompany these instruments. They can find more meaning and interest from feedback environment and fulfill their psychological needs, the internalization of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation will be promoted, thus contributing to the creative behavior of individuals if feedback environment is supportive (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

Our study echoes recent suggestions that organizations interested in stimulating employee creativity might profitably focus on developing work contexts that support it. As discussed by Shalley and Zhou (2008), such contexts may be developed by setting creativity goals, making creativity a job requirement and building reward systems that value employee creativity. Based on this study, Leaders should strive to build a supportive feedback environment, improve feedback credibility, have support staff actively seeking feedback behavior, improve the quality of their feedback and offer feedback with taking more consideration of employees’ psychological experience, etc. Organizations may develop contexts that support creativity by training employees to give each other well-construed feedback and encouraging them to seek feedback from each other, rather than limiting themselves to supervisor-delivered feedback.

Our results also suggest that if creative performance is the organization’s goal, there is value in stimulating effective feedback exchanges by focusing on the supervisor–employee relationship. In the enterprise management practice, it is essential not only to achieve flow of top-down feedback but also ensure the feedback in parallel communication. In the enterprise practice, if an employee needs complete creative task, the supervisor can choose an employee who has a high creative personality.

Although our findings have made some contribution to answering several recent questions in the feedback-creative performance literature, this study has several limitations.

One limitation is the sample. The small sample size reported here may have affected the current results. However, this small sample size coupled with the significant results suggests that the current findings are reliable. our data were from an organization in China, and therefore the external validity of our findings may not be accurate. Our analysis does not preclude different interpretations in other settings since organizational or cultural difference may influence employees’ attitudes and behaviors. Future studies should add more samples, which will make the results more specific and representative. To improve the generalizability of our results, future research should replicate our model employing multi-organization and cross-national samples.

Second, this study relies on cross-sectional data; therefore, no causal relationships of the studied variables can be unambiguously established, because the longitudinal research design may have other explanations. It may be that some of the relationships we found may operate in reverse. For example, it may be that a favorable feedback environment does not promote internalization of work goals, but that when employees pursue self-concordant work goals and thus demonstrate high levels of ownership with regard to their work goals, supervisors are more likely to provide them with well-construed and high-quality feedback and to be receptive and available when these employees seek feedback. To ascertain causality, future studies can start from similar experimental designs or from time-series designs to collect longitudinal data that clarifies the causal relationships among the studied variables.

Third, prior studies have demonstrate that supervisors engaged in close monitoring and unsupportive coworkers (Zhou and George, 2001), rewarding creativity (Sue-Chan and Hempel, 2016), and task autonomy (Davidson and De Stobbeleir, 2011) can influence creative performance, but in this research we only focused on demographic variables as control variables. Future research should add more diverse control variables for a deeper understanding of relevant issues and add more confidence to the conclusions.

Last, the coworker feedback environment is also very important. In a work field where employees usually have a lot of contact with coworkers, the coworkers’ feedback environment may play a different role in affecting creative performance. By incorporating coworkers as well as supervisors as important feedback sources, some study recognized and found support for the importance of coworker feedback with regard to creative performance. By showing that employees’ perceptions of a favorable coworker feedback environment stimulate them to be creative throughout their goal striving, in future not only we should focus on supervisor feedback and feedback as a generic construct (Zhou and George, 2001; George and Zhou, 2007), but also highlight the importance of coworkers in the workplace (Chiaburu and Harrison, 2008).