The innovation journey is not always smooth, a typical example being that supervisors may reject their subordinates’ ideas, affecting their enthusiasm to participate in the creative process. Following Feedback intervention theory, this research introduces a dual-path framework to deepen knowledge about employee creative process re-engagement following the supervisor’s idea rejection. The model considers task crafting (task process) and autonomous motivations (meta process) as mediating variables and supervisor-subordinate guanxi as a moderating variable to uncover the underlying mechanism and the boundary conditions of the relationship between the supervisor’s idea rejection and employee’s creative process re-engagement. A three-wave longitudinal data collection design was conducted, with 325 samples from a large game company in China. Our findings demonstrate that (1) supervisor-subordinate guanxi negatively moderates the relationship between idea rejection and task crafting, while positively moderates the relationship between idea rejection and autonomous motivations; (2) the relationship between the supervisor’s idea rejection and the employee’s creative process re-engagement is positively mediated by task crafting and negatively mediated by autonomous motivations; (3) supervisor-subordinate guanxi moderates the association between supervisor’s idea rejection and employee’s creative process re-engagement via task crafting and autonomous motivation. We discuss how this study extends the literature on creativity-related research, guanxi and feedback intervention theory.
