Abstract:     Creativity has received increasing attention across a variety of tasks, occupations and industries. Previous studies mainly focused on practical skills and behaviors to inspire leaders to boost employee creativity. Existing studies indicate that leaders should express their expectations for creativity through setting goals, providing resources, giving emotional and instrumental supports and other means. In spite of this, little attention was paid to the expectations of leaders for creativity. Enlightened by the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, this research put forward the first research question: ‘Will leaders’ expectations for employee creativity enhance their creativity effectively? If being proven to exist in the workplace, this ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ can greatly expand theoretical boundaries to which it is applicable. Moreover, it is of great significance to the theoretical research and enterprise practice of leadership. 
    Another research question needing to be explored was: Will this ‘expectation effect’ be different when it comes to different groups in China? In order to achieve this aim, this research attempted to start from a generation gap. With the development of knowledge-based economy and the further progress of the reform and opening-up policy, post-80s and post-90s have become the new generations standing for the major force of organizations because of showing more willingness to embody personalities and shape themselves as distinctive. This research assumed that these specific psychological and behavioral characteristics owned by these groups enabled them to react differently to their perceptions of psychological empowerment induced by the expectations of the superior. 
   Data was collected from 484 employees working in 112 teams of a large enterprise located in six cities in some eastern coastal provinces of China. Each team was composed of non-Cenozoic members and members of the new generations like the post-80s or post-90s. Data collection contained three waves with an interval of two months. To begin with, participants were required to report their demographic information (such as age, gender, education as well as tenure in the team and organization), perceived organizational support and their perceptions of leaders′ expectations for their creativity. In the meantime, team supervisors were invited to report their trust in followers. Employees′ demographic variables, perceived organizational support and leaders′ trust in followers were treated as control variables in the following analyses. Participants assessed their psychological empowerment in the second wave, namely two months after time point 1. Team supervisors evaluated the creativity of their subordinates at time point 3 which was four months after time point 1. 
    SPSS 22.0 and Mplus 8.0 were adopted to estimate the hypothesized models. The hypotheses put forward in this study were all verified. (1) The results of hierarchical regression showed a positive and significant coefficient of the relationship between the leaders′ expectations for creativity and employee creativity (B= 0.146, p<0.05). (2) With the bootstrapping approach (1000 resamples) to test the mediation effect in Mplus, the results suggested that the mediation effect of psychological empowerment on the ‘expectation effect’ was significant (ind=-0.021, bias-corrected 95% CI=\[0.005, 0.053\], excluding 0). It showed that leaders′ expectations for employee creativity in the workplace were beneficial to the psychological empowerment of employees, thereby improving their creative performance. (3) Based on the analysis of the moderated path (with bootstrapping), it was found that the indirect effect of leaders′ expectations for creativity on employee creativity (through psychological empowerment, the mediator) could be moderated by intergenerational difference at the second stage. The difference of the indirect effect of ‘expectation effect’ through psychological empowerment reached a significant level (diff = 0.029, bias-corrected 95% CI=\[0.001, 0.081\], excluding 0). The results showed that the indirect effect would be stronger for the group of the new generations in comparison with the non-Cenozoic group. (4) In addition, a sub-sample analysis was carried out to further support the above conclusions. The results of sub-sample regression revealed that ‘expectation effect’ would have a greater impact on post-80s and post-90s groups (B=0.158，p.<0.05), but little impact on the non-Cenozoic group (B=0.098，p>0.05). 
    This research could come to two main important conclusions. First, the "self-fulfilling prophecy" of leaders′ expectations for employee creativity did exist in the work place. Second, the response of employees to superior′s expectations for creativity was intergenerational. The ‘expectation effect’ would be stronger for the post-80s and post-90s generations.
    The possible contributions of this research were as follows. Firstly, the results suggested that the expectation effect of leaders would be of great help to employee creativity, which enriched the research of antecedents on creativity. During the process, it was verified that the leaders could facilitate the creativity of employees by expressing their ‘expectations’. The inner mechanism was that leaders′ expectations for creativity would ignite the creativity of employees through enhancing the psychological empowerment of employees. Secondly, this research probed into different responses of different groups to leaders′ expectations and pointed out that this ‘expectation effect’ tended to be of more importance to the new generations. At present, it is a commonplace that different generations coexist in the workplaces. If catering to the new generations′ characteristic of ‘dynamic and potential enough to be creative’, leaders will take more effective actions to guide employees and cultivate their creativity. Thirdly, this research expanded the boundary to which the self-fulfilling prophecy theory was applicable. Traditional research relevant to self-fulfilling prophecy were mainly carried out under experimental conditions. Meanwhile, very few studies tested the impact of leaders′ expectations on the performance of employees in the workplace, while this research was designed according to the real expectations connected with self-fulfilling prophecy within organizations. In this research, ‘leaders’ expectations for the creativity of subordinates′ were not manipulated just like in the experiments, but some were real and reported by employees themselves. This research indicated the effect of self-fulfilling prophecy in the workplaces as what it was and provided powerful support for the possibility of its replicability in the field of creativity.

Key words: self-fulfilling prophecy, intergenerational difference, creativity, psychological empowerment