Abstract:    How entrepreneurial passion stimulates the creativity of employees is the focus of entrepreneurship research. Although there are some studies on the relationship between passion and creativity in the existing literature, most of them are based on the perspective of employees while few have discussed the impact of entrepreneurial passion on employee creativity. In recent years, some scholars found that entrepreneurial passion influences employee creativity through middle managers′ leadership style. They also proposed that the future research needs to consider other mediation mechanism. To fill the research gap, this paper analyzed how entrepreneur passion affects employee creativity at different levels from the perspective of cognitive and emotional processes of passion transmission.Based on the theory of emotional contagion, entrepreneurial passion will affect the employees′ working enthusiasm through emotional contagion process. The passionate entrepreneurs are more likely to show transformational leadership behavior to provide employee with adequate resources and freedom to verify its ideas and creativity, improve employees′ organizational identification. At the same time, passion is not only limited to the individual level, but also can be expressed as a team level. The team passion atmosphere will stimulate the intrinsic motivation of employees to participate in the innovation process, improve the individual cognitive flexibility of processing information, and promote interpersonal interaction among team members, which is conducive to the improvement of employee creativity. In addition, the level of self-promotion skills of entrepreneurs will moderate the transmission effect of entrepreneur passion, and then affect the mediating effect of entrepreneur passion on employee creativity through team passion atmosphere and organizational identification.This paper used the multi-level and multi-source paired data to test the hypothesis model, and it was found that entrepreneurial passion has a significant positive impact on employee creativity. Team passionate atmosphere and organizational identification play mediating role between them. The self-promotion ability of entrepreneurs not only moderates the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and team passionate atmosphere and organizational identification, but also further moderates the indirect effect of entrepreneurial passion on employee creativity through team passionate atmosphere and organizational identification.The research contribution of this paper are as follows: Firstly, based on the perspective of entrepreneurs, the influence of entrepreneurial passion on employee creativity was analyzed, which will enrich the current research on the influence mechanism of employee creativity. Secondly, considering the cross-level characteristics of the organization, this paper will enrich the research on the cross-level transmission process of entrepreneurial passion. Thirdly, it was found in this paper that there is a moderating effect of entrepreneur self-promotion on the cognitive mechanism and emotional mechanism of entrepreneurial passion, which will further clarify the boundary conditions of entrepreneurial passion. The conclusions of this paper have the following implications for entrepreneurs: First, entrepreneurs need to let their employees see and feel their entrepreneurial passion. Second, entrepreneurs should pay close attention to the cultivation of team passion atmosphere, so that the employees' identification with entrepreneurs can be further transformed into identification with the organization. Third, entrepreneurs should learn the art of self-promotion to focus on whether passion is adequately and accurately conveyed.

Key words:  entrepreneurial passion, team passion atmosphere, organizational identification, employee creativity