Clarifying CSE on Job Performance: The Roles of Innovative Work Behavior & Transformational Leaders

While core self-evaluation (CSE) as a significant aspect of individual personality is said to positively affect job performance, our understanding of this relationship is still limited. So as to advance our knowledge of this issue, we need to consider (1) intervening constructs through which and (2) the situational context in which CSE affects job performance. Specifically, this study examines innovative work behavior and transformational leadership as key mediating and moderating constructs, respectively, of the CSE-supervisor rated job performance link. Building on the personality-trait based interactionist model of job performance, we argue that innovative work behavior (IWB) mediates the CSE-job performance link and consider transformational leadership (TFL) as an important situational context factor. We propose that TFL is a situation strengthener that can increase the IWB of employees low on CSE, but does not significantly impact high-CSE employees. Further, transformational leaders’ high performance expectations can lead them to systematically evaluate the job performance of their subordinates and especially the contribution of IWB to job performance less favorably than leaders that do not adopt a TFL approach. Testing our hypotheses with time-lagged, multi-informant data from 245 employee-supervisor dyads supports our expectations that IWB mediates the CSE-job performance link and that TFL dampens the positive effect of IWB on job performance. In contrast to our expectation, TFL does not significantly moderate the effect of CSE on IWB in our sample. We discuss the implications of these findings for the academic literature and management practice.