This study determines the impact of loneliness on creativity through a powerful and essential mediator of intrinsic motivation. The ability to motivate oneself leads towards the accomplishment of tasks and creative work. In recent years, workplace loneliness has become a more critical issue in both academic and practical debates. So, this study highlighted the significant cause of creativity which could help the organization to handle the problem of loneliness. The study assumes that when isolation at the workplace is high, employees are less approachable towards their tasks. So, their performance and creativity reduced. Because loneliness leads to stress, depression and anger, it reduces the creative skills of employees. To enhance creativity, lonely employees must be motivated to minimise their adverse outcomes. So, the research question arises: Does intrinsic motivation (IM) intervene in between the workplace loneliness (WL) and employees' creativity? This study is also significant because employees and employers' relations are the backbone of their respective organizations and directly affect the performance and growth of their respective organizations. A data collection survey method was held on employees of Banking Sector currently working in Vehari district of Pakistan. Sample space was the employees of Pakistani banks working on officer grades. There is a total of 124 bank branches in Vehari District of Pakistan. In these 124 branches, a total of 726 employees were working on managerial positions which were targeted for data collection. Simple random sampling technique was employed to collect the information from the respondents. Simple random sampling techniques were used to avoid from the busyness and undesirable unknown effects from the target population. Data were obtained from 400 banking officers. For data collection, validated and adapted questionnaires were used. Each variable of the survey was measured through a Likert scale of 5 points. For statistics evaluation, the statistical tools such as reliability of data, collinearity of data, the association of variable's, mediation and Regression were tested. For data reliability and validation, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was used while to measure the direct, indirect or mediation effect was measured through smart pls 3. Smart PLS3 is a landmark in latent variable modelling. It combines state of the art methods with an easy to use and in-built graphical user interface. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is utilized to quantify the power of essential philosophies with spotted data. Results showed Workplace Loneliness has a definite and meaningful relationship with employee's creativity. Results also supported the intervening role of Intrinsic motivation (IM) between the relationship Workplace Loneliness (WL) on Employees’ creativity (EC). The study provides significant implications in literature and for practitioners who are interested in measuring the profound effect of loneliness on creativity. Hypotheses are tested through mediation and for mediation analysis through the most commonly used approach of baron and Kenny. From results, it is stated that workplace loneliness is predicting the intrinsic motivation and creativity. Intrinsic motivation is the mediator in the current study, which partially intermediates the relation of WL and EC. So, it can be stated that employees can only be creative and able to utilize their cognition abilities for creativity when they are socially isolated from other works. The findings authenticate all hypotheses and their correspondence between the workplace loneliness, creativity and intrinsic motivation. In a nutshell, intrinsic motivation is the crucial element for creativity because when employees are internally satisfied with their work, they become energized and motivated and perform their work in a creative way.
Keywords
employees creativity, intrinsic motivation, mediation analysis, structural equation modeling, workplace loneliness.
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