Helping behavior and employee creativity: The combined roles of mastery and performance motivation climates

Researchers have argued that giving help is negatively related to creativity, because helping costs time and resources. However, this argument overlooks the fact that interaction of the help giver with the help receiver may also be regarded as a learning process, which, in turn, promotes creativity. Drawing on achievement goal theory, we proposed that the interplay of the motivational climates of mastery and performance in an organization would moderate the curvilinear relationship between helping behavior and individual creativity. On the basis of survey data obtained from 239 employees and their supervisors nested within 49 teams, hierarchical linear modeling results show that when the mastery climate is dominant the relationship between help giving and employee creativity becomes positive and more linear, whereas when the performance climate is dominant the relationship becomes negative and more linear. The implications of these findings are discussed.