The Relationship of CSR and Employee Creativity in the Hotel Sector: The Mediating Role of Job Autonomy

Abstract

Despite the growing surge in the literature about employee creativity, the mainstream literature largely views it from an organizational perspective, and ignores the underlying mechanism that motivates employees to be engaged in different creative tasks. Against this backdrop, the current work was carried out to explore the relationship of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and employee creativity with the mediating effect of autonomy to explain the motivational pull for employee creativity. The data were collected from the employees of the hotel sector of Pakistan through a self-administered questionnaire (n = 511) and were analyzed by employing the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The results revealed that CSR, through the mediating effect of job autonomy, influences employees’ creativity significantly. The findings of the current analysis will help both academia and professionals from the hotel sector to understand the importance of CSR as a booster for employee creativity. Furthermore, the potential role of job autonomy as a mediator in explaining this relationship will also help policymakers to understand the importance of freedom at the workplace to engage the workforce in different extra-roles, including creativity.