Do social relationships at work enhance creativity and innovative behavior? Role of psychological safety

The study uses social exchange theory to examine how social relationships affect individual involvement in creativity at work and innovative behavior, mediated by psychological safety. The study disentangles the social relationships at work as informal and formal relationships in terms of two plausible theoretical variables, workplace friendliness and perceived affective climate respectively, for the above purpose. Over a period of three-months, data collection was conducted in the IT and ITeS industry, with a sample of 515 participants and 105 team leads, using a two-pronged approach involving data from both team leads and their subordinates. The findings indicate a positive association between workplace friendliness (informal) as well as perceived affective climate (formal), and employee involvement in creativity with psychological safety as mediator, further leading to innovative behavior. The study suggests that fostering a positive, conducive formal work environment and workplace friendships can enhance employees' psychological safety, which enables them to put their creative ideas into action, which can help organizations get a competitive edge by finding novel ways of solving business challenges.