Assessing the impact of work environment factors on employee creative performance of fine-dining restaurants

The purpose of this study is to examine the factors that influence the creativity of restaurant employees. Postulates are that work environment, specifically social support within an organization, resources, freedom, and regulations, strongly impact the creativity of employees in terms of their ability to create new dishes. Creative performance is treated as having both quantity and quality dimensions. This allows the study to observe how antecedent factors interact with different types of the performance measures. A model is developed and tested. Using a questionnaire, data were collected from 304 full-time employees working in the kitchens of four-star and five-star hotels in Taiwan. To test the hypotheses, the data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM). Resources can greatly improve the quantity, but less so the quality aspect of creative performance. For creative performance, freedom is more important than regulations. The findings provide insights that help organizations facilitate creativity of employees.