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A multilevel perspective of developmental feedback and employee creativity
Frontiers in Psychology
|March 23, 2026
Summary
Developmental feedback from supervisors and teams boosts creativity by improving problem identification. Aligned feedback across levels enhances idea generation, advancing creativity theory.
Area of Science:
- Organizational Psychology
- Creativity Studies
- Management Science
Background:
- The relationship between feedback and creativity is complex and not fully understood.
- Existing research often treats feedback as a single-source input, overlooking multilevel influences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine how multilevel developmental feedback influences employee creativity.
- To resolve the puzzle of why feedback sometimes predicts creativity and sometimes does not.
- To advance creativity theory from outcome-based to process-based accounts.
Main Methods:
- A multilevel perspective integrating supervisor and team developmental feedback.
- Data collected from 642 employees nested in 103 teams at a telecommunication company in China.
- Hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data.
Main Results:
- Both supervisor developmental feedback (SDF) and team developmental feedback (TDF) positively relate to employee creativity.
- Problem identification mediated the SDF-creativity link.
- Team reflexivity mediated the SDF-problem identification and creativity links.
Conclusions:
- Developmental feedback, when aligned across supervisor and team levels, enhances creativity.
- Informational, motivational, and future-oriented feedback fosters novel and useful idea generation.
- The study highlights the importance of multilevel feedback systems and process-based creativity accounts.
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