[Podcast] Boosting Employee Creativity with Constructive Feedback
23 November, 2024
Keywords: Acquisition; Operational skills; Constructive feedback; Employee creativity
Organizations have faced increased pressure to foster creativity and innovation among their employees so as to maintain a competitive advantage. The fact that leaders play a key role by providing constructive feedback enhances skills and empowers employees to acquire and apply new knowledge. However, the link between supervisor feedback and employee creative outcomes remains inconsistent. This study by the author from the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH) explores practical skills as a key factor in bridging the gap between constructive feedback and creative performance and examines how individual acquisition moderates the impact of leadership feedback on creativity.

In today’s constantly changing market environment, the success of each organization depends closely on factors listed as employees’ knowledge, experience, creative contributions, and the organization’s ability to innovate. Among the factors that influence creative performance, the role of leaders is a key factor in promoting employee creativity. Leaders can provide positive feedback that helps employees understand how to improve their skills and to create opportunities for them to acquire and to apply new knowledge in their work. Positive feedback from leaders has the strongest impact on employee attitudes and behaviors because managers hold high power and status in the organization. This feedback is different from conventional feedback, which often focuses on evaluating employees’ past behaviors, attitudes, or work performance. However, empirical evidence showing a direct link between management constructive feedback and employee creative performance is being mixed. More specifically, some studies have found that constructive feedback is positively correlated with employee creativity while others have found no significant relationship. Therefore, this study was conducted to investigate the role of operational skills as an important mechanism linking constructive feedback with employee creative performance. Concurrently, to better understand the implicit effect of constructive feedback from management on employee creative performance, this study examined the moderating role of individual-level knowledge acquisition ability. From these findings, the study proposes management solutions to help companies improve employee creative performance.
Research Sample

This study collected data from organizations in the information technology industry in Vietnam, in which innovation is a core element of daily work. In the context of the industry’s continuous development, employees are encouraged to be innovative to maintain a competitive advantage. Vietnam’s transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy has increased the need for innovation, especially in the information technology industry, where businesses are under pressure to implement new ideas to develop pioneering products and services. This transition has made innovation a vital factor, making the information technology industry an ideal context to study the impact of developmental feedback from leaders on employees’ innovative performance, through the mediating role of operational skills and knowledge acquisition. The study also hopes to provide valuable insights for other industries facing similar pressures.
Research Methodology
This study was conducted in two phases: a qualitative pilot study and a main survey. The qualitative pilot study included in-depth interviews to refine the survey objectives. Next, the main survey applied a convenience sampling method, which is common in data collection. The authors received support from the director and human resource manager after explaining the research objectives. The questionnaires were distributed to full-time employees during working hours, including product developers, programmers, administrative and marketing staff, and they returned the complete questionnaires to the human resource staff. Finally, the authors collected the complete questionnaires.
The data analysis process took place in several stages. First, normality testing was performed to determine the estimation for Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). Second, CFA was used to validate the scale. Finally, SEM was applied to test the conceptual model and hypotheses.
The mediating role of operational skills
Operational skills are defined as “the organizational and interpersonal abilities required to successfully manage a project or change” (Birdi et al., 2016, p. 22). The purpose of constructive feedback from managers is to help employees understand how to perform their jobs and to achieve career growth (Tiantian et al., 2021). After receiving constructive feedback from supervisors, employees will actively engage in learning to improve their work methods, operational skills, and professional competencies. Domain-related skills enhance employees’ confidence in their ability to achieve positive outcomes, motivating them to proactively cope with difficulties and uncertainties in the creative process (Su et al., 2022b). When employees possess advanced technical skills listed as operational skills, they are able to generate new ideas and solutions easily because they understand the causes of problems and can combine comprehensive knowledge and competencies to create innovative solutions (Liu et al., 2017).
The moderating role of acquisition
Acquisition is defined as “the ability to identify, to acquire, to integrate, and to apply new knowledge from the outside to enhance competitiveness” (Tho, 2017, p. 1243). This ability helps employees easily recognize and use valuable information from managers to develop personal capabilities (Yildiz et al., 2021; Yildiz et al., 2024). Specifically, employees with high absorptive ability can identify and learn knowledge from external sources, including information from managers (Tho, 2017). According to Thuan (2020), when managers share information, these employees can absorb information more effectively. The process of information transfer depends on both the source and the receiver (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008); if individuals have low receptive ability, they will not actively absorb information, resulting in less knowledge acquisition (Chang et al., 2012). Therefore, receptive ability can moderate the impact of constructive feedback from managers on operational skills, with a stronger impact as the receptive ability is high. In addition, when employees have high receptive ability, they can effectively apply external knowledge to improve work performance (Tho, 2017). They are able to update knowledge, to apply new ideas, and to integrate with the existing skills, which stimulates creative thinking and generates many new ideas (Greco et al., 2019). However, one of the biggest barriers to information transfer is the low receptive ability of the recipient (Szulanski, 1996), so high (low) receptive ability can strengthen (weaken) the link between operational skills and employee creativity.

Findings
Based on time-lagged data from 317 employees working in information technology organizations in Vietnam, this study found that operational skills play a full mediating role in the relationship between developmental feedback from managers and employee creativity. In addition, the study confirmed that receptiveness positively moderates the relationship between managers’ constructive feedback and employees’ operational skills, as well as the relationship between operational skills and employee creativity. These findings not only shed light on the important role of constructive feedback in promoting creativity but also highlight the importance of receptiveness in optimizing employee performance.
Although positive feedback can stimulate employee attitudes and behaviors, the existing literature is limited in showing how constructive feedback from managers affects employees’ creative performance (Li and Xie, 2023; Shang et al., 2024; Thuan, 2021). Managers can encourage creativity through various mechanisms; nevertheless, the role of domain-relevant skills in connecting manager behavior to employee creativity has received little attention (Arici and Uysal, 2022; Hughes et al., 2018; Thuan, 2020). This finding suggests that employees’ operational skills play an important role in the relationship between leadership feedback and creative performance. Therefore, this paper not only addresses the need for new mediating mechanisms but also explores the role of operational skills. In addition, the study results contribute to the literature on individual learning ability by examining it as a moderator in the relationship between manager constructive feedback and operational skills as well as between operational skills and employee creativity. The findings suggest that employees with higher learning ability recognize, acquire, and integrate valuable information from their managers, improving their operational skills and generating more new ideas. This is an important contribution because previous studies have focused primarily on learning ability at the organizational level, ignoring its role at the individual level in fostering creativity.
Policy implications
Constructive feedback from managers implicitly affects employee creativity through improving operational skills.
Managers play a key role in fostering employee growth and development by providing actionable, useful information that fosters learning and skill development. In today’s dynamic workplace, managers can effectively coach employees by providing informational and developmental feedback that is tailored to address job challenges and the latest technological advances. This proactive approach involves working closely with employees to identify and to address potential issues while staying up to date on industry trends to provide timely guidance. To maximize impact, managers should provide regular constructive feedback focused on improving performance and actively engage with employees, especially when they seek advice on generating innovative ideas, products, and processes. Furthermore, organizations should prioritize hiring individuals with strong operational skills, especially for roles that require a high level of creativity. When hiring for management positions, companies should also look for candidates with a track record of providing positive feedback as these individuals are able to inspire and guide their teams in developing new and innovative ideas. In this way, organizations can create a supportive environment where constant improvement and innovation thrive.
Absorbency positively moderating the relationship between constructive feedback and operational skills as well as the relationship between operational skills and employee creativity.
To remain competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations must prioritize improving their employees’ acquisition capacity. The ability to acquire and to effectively apply valuable information from managers is critical to improve both operational skills and foster employee creativity. To achieve this, companies can provide target training programs that equip employees with the tools they need to identify, collect, integrate, and use key information from internal sources listed as managers.
In addition, organizations can adopt a multi-pronged approach to enhancing learning by (1) strengthening the knowledge acquisition process; (2) encouraging active knowledge sharing; (3) building a culture of life-long learning; (4) promoting cross-functional collaboration; (5) building strong internal networks; (6) investing in advanced technology and infrastructure; and (7) promoting an experiment-centric mindset and taking predicted risks. By focusing on these areas, organizations can empower their workforce to keep up with industry changes, to innovate and to excel.
The full-text article Boosting Employee Creativity with Constructive Feedback can be found HERE.
Authors: Le Cong Thuan, Phan Thi Kim Lan – University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City (UEH).
This article is part of the series spreading research and applied knowledge from UEH with the message “Research Contribution For All. UEH respectfully invites readers to read the next UEH Research Insights newsletter.
News, photos: Authors, UEH Department of Communications and Partnership

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