Proactivity and Employee Creativity: Mediator Roles of Feedback-Seeking Behavior and Moderating Effect of Task Feedback

Employee creativity is needed in this ever-changing environment, especially in profit-making companies. To stand out among competitors, proactivity and creativity are essential for marketing employees to attain top performance. The literature has found inconsistent results regarding the relationship between proactivity and creativity. Research has shown that the interaction between individual and environmental factors determines employee behavior. Thus, we focus on the interaction between an individual factor such as proactivity and an environmental factor such as task feedback to predict creativity. In this study, we use a sample of 256 marketing employees from seven companies in Indonesia. The results indicate that feedback-seeking behavior mediates the relationship between proactive personality and employee creativity. Task feedback moderates the relationship between a proactive personality and feedback-seeking behavior such that the relationship becomes stronger when the task feedback is positive than when the feedback is negative. Theoretical and practical implications of this study’s contribution to literature are discussed.