Help me help you: How HR analytics forecasts foster organizational creativity

Organizational creativity is increasingly deemed a crucial source of organizational effectiveness and competitive advantage. As several previous researches found that some human resource management (HRM) activities act as antecedents of organizational creativity, HR-related decisions are increasingly deemed as high stake decisions, as poor choices may originate large financial loss and may be very costly to reverse. For this reason, organizations are relying more and more on a data-driven approach also when it comes to HRM, for example by increasingly resorting to HR analytics tools to inform and guide the decision-making process. Consequently, the objective of this study is to empirically investigate the effect of an HRM data-driven approach on organizational creativity. Data were collected through online questionnaires addressed to 281 HR managers of heterogeneous companies from Europe and analyzed through a structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. Our results found employee training, organizational knowledge sharing, and recruitment and selection to be positively related to organizational creativity, and that HR analytics positively moderated these relationships. On the contrary, no significant effect was found regarding the relationship between employee rewards and incentives and organizational creativity, and neither regarding the moderating effect of HR analytics. Our study thus contributes to research regarding high stake decisions by empirically demonstrating HR analytics' positive impact on the decision-making process regarding the workforce, also in a peculiar context as organizational creativity. It also contributes to organizational creativity literature by clarifying the mixed findings regarding its antecedents. Finally, it provides further empirical confirmation of the contingency theory applied to HRM.