Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the roles of four distinct but related aspects of psychological capital – optimism, hope, self-efficacy and resilience – in facilitating employee creativity. Drawing on the psychological capital perspective and the creativity literature, we propose that optimism and hope increase employee self-efficacy and resilience, which benefits employee creativity. Moreover, the authors hypothesize that self-efficacy and resilience have mediating roles in the psychological capital context, which, in turn, has a positive effect on individual employees’ creativity. Design/methodology/approach: Data were obtained from a survey of multiple manufacturing firms on individual employee psychological capital and creativity. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypotheses regarding psychological capital and creativity in a sample of 468 individual employees. Findings: The results provide evidence that only resilience plays a mediating role between optimism and hope and employee creativity. The authors found that psychological capital is positively related to employee creativity. Practical implications: These findings provide guidance for understanding how to better address the psychological capital that contributes to employee creativity in the workplace. Specifically, this study provides a rationale for facilitating the development of employee creativity by exposing the effect and path of psychological capital. Originality/value: This study is the first to examine the antecedents and mediating role of four distinct yet correlated dimensions of psychological capital on employee creativity. The findings of this study contribute to the theoretical development of a conceptual model that investigates the black box of the four aspects of psychological capital and creativity.

Corporate social innovation is a novel, strategic means for enterprise to establish competitive advantage through collaboration with powerful stakeholders, like governments, where firms are simultaneously able to meet social needs and benefit themselves. There is, however limited empirical research investigating how such collaboration enables the co-creation of innovation between firms and society, particularly in emerging markets. In response, this paper takes corporate universities (CUs), a typical manifestation of corporate social innovation, as an example, and explores whether CUs encourage employees to engage in innovation and pro-environmental behaviors, thereby contributing to their firms and local communities in China. Using quantitative methods, we found that employees’ participation in CU training/education courses significantly affects employees’ innovation and environmentally-friendly behaviors in both work and life, and that it enhances their normative commitment (NC) to organizations. Moreover, this commitment mediates employees’ participation in the university program, in terms of both their innovation and pro-environmental behaviors. The main contribution of this paper is to enrich the innovation literature by suggesting a fresh, co-creation mechanism of social innovation between enterprise and government, while offering valuable first-hand evidence in a non-Western context. Our results allow policy makers and stakeholders to gain an in depth understanding of relevant issues.

Population urbanization is crucial to establishing a harmonious society. However, the phenomenon of population semi-urbanization is becoming an issue of ever-increasing concern in China. More and more immigrants from rural areas work and live in the city, but their roots remain in the rural area. This paper aims to analyze the influence mechanism of government competition on population semi-urbanization through land supply structure. The study’s theoretical analysis and empirical analysis results are based on the panel data of 105 key prefecture-level cities in China from 2007 to 2017. The results demonstrate that: (1) land finance and land-motivated investment engendered by government competition lead to an imbalance in the land price structure, further increasing the rate of population semi-urbanization; (2) land finance does not lead to population semi-urbanization through the land area structure; and (3) land-motivated investment aggravates the imbalance in the land area structure, further leading to population semi-urbanization. It is found that government competition in terms of achieving performance indicators affects population semi-urbanization by adjusting the land supply structure. Efforts should be made to achieve the coordinated development of urbanization, given that the increasing rate of population semi-urbanization will almost certainly aggravate social instability.

Good management of companies in the energy industry is critical to the world’s sustainable development as they are the guarantor of social lives and the cornerstone of economic development. This study tries to figure out how to improve the management of energy companies from the angle of new media use. It is widely known that the emergence of new media has provided more opportunities for the development of various entities in society, especially in improving the interaction mode of “enterprise–employee” and “enterprise–consumer”, and boosting the efficiency of information transmission. However, the technical and cutting-edge features of those new media have also resulted in some obstacles in their promotion among employees. To address this problem, this paper took the perspective of the social influence theory and the technological acceptance model (TAM), and sampled 20,161 employees from the energy industry in China to explore the effects of creative self-efficacy, perceived usefulness in information acquisition and perceived usefulness in communication on employees’ use of new media. Results have shown that both creative self-efficacy and perceived usefulness have positive effects on new media use of employees, and perceived usefulness mediates the relationship between creative self-efficacy and new media use. Leaders’ use moderates the mediation relationship, while it weakens the relationship between perceived usefulness and new media use. Our study enriches the knowledge regarding new media promotion and thereby offers insightful and practical implications for corporate managers.