Employee creativity has been recognized as a critical underpinning for organizational growth and success (Zhou & Hoever, 2014; Zhou & Shalley, 2011). Accumulating research evidence has demonstrated that employee creativity has strong implications for many important performance outcomes (Anderson, Poto
cnik, & Zhou, 2014; Liu, Jiang, Shalley, Keem, & Zhou, in press). Research, therefore, has continued to explore potential factors that can facilitate employee creativity in the workplace (Anderson et al., 2014; Zhou & Hoever, 2014). In this respect, HRM plays a vital role in developing human capital for employee creativity through its major functions of training development, work design, and strategic recruitment in organizations (e.g., Binyamin & Carmeli, 2010; Dul, Ceylan, & Jaspers, 2011). Developing effective leadership such as transformational leadership has been regarded as a useful way to motivate employees to generate novel and useful ideas for services, practices, and procedures (Henker, Sonnentag, & Unger, 2015; Shalley & Zhou, 2008; C. J. Wang, Tsai, & Tsai, 2014; G. Wang, Oh, Courtright, & Colbert, 2011; Zhou & Shalley, 2011). A number of studies have revealed that transformational leadership has a positive impact on creative outcomes (Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009; Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009; Henker et al., 2015; Pieterse, Van Knippenberg, Schippers, & Stam, 2010; Shih, Chiang, & Chen, 2012; Wang et al., 2014). Given the evidence for its effectiveness, researchers have begun to investigate different underlying mechanisms through which transformational leadership influences employee creativity (e.g., Eisenbeis & Boerner, 2013; Gong et al., 2009; Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009). In doing so, past research has focused on a few key mechanisms—intrinsic motivation, creative process engagement, creative self-efficacy, and prosocial motivation underpinned by componential theory of creativity, social cognitive theory, and prosocial motivation theory (cf. Amabile, 1998; Chen, Li, & Tang, 2009; Gong et al., 2009; Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009; Henker et al., 2015; Shin & Zhou, 2003). The findings of these studies are inspiring, but more research attention is needed to explore other jobfocused motivational mechanisms that are relevant to advance our understanding of the transformational leadership–creativity relationship within an individual’s work role from the HRM perspective (Anderson et al., 2014; Li, Deng, Leung, & Zhao, in press; Liu et al., in press; Shih et al., 2012). The expected findings of this study can provide new insights into the work design research in HRM, which informs HR managers to think of effective strategies and systems that can redesign frontline employees’ work roles for creativity. One of the potential but neglected job-focused motivational mechanisms is personal control, which has been defined as “an individual’s beliefs, at a given point in time, in his or her ability to affect a change, in a desired direction” (Greenberger & Strasser, 1986, p. 165). Researchers have conceptualized personal control as one’s sense of autonomy in initiating and regulating action, and the degree to which the person believes that his or her behavior influences important outcomes in the work environment (Brockner et al., 2004).