Abstract:    Employee creativity is an important driving force for the transformation and upgrading of enterprises. Although existing research has begun to focus on the influencing factors of employee creativity, few researches pay sufficient attention to the relationship between workplace situational factors, employee psychological factors and employee creativity. As a situational factor in the workplace, pressure affects employee creativity. Pressure affects the work attitude and behavior of employees and leaders, and even causes adverse consequences such as depression, drug abuse, aggression, and abnormal death. At the same time, employee creative self-efficacy, as a psychological factor, has been proven to be a key predictor of job creativity and a key mediating mechanism of situational and personal factor. However, the existing research seldom considers the role of employees′ psychological factor, namely creative self-efficacy when employees′ pressure acts on employees′ behaviors in work situations. In addition, leadership style is an important part of the work environment and can also have an impact on employees′ behaviors. Therefore, this research introduces a new leadership style, the paradoxical leadership, into the research framework when exploring the impact mechanism of employee creativity. Based on the above, this study firstly studied the effect of time pressure on employee creativity, that is, when employee creative self-efficacy is used as a mediating variable, the effect of time pressure on creativity; secondly, we took paradoxical leadership and time pressure as the working environment and creative self-efficacy as a personality trait, to explore its influence on employee creativity from the perspective of interaction between employees′ personality traits and situational characteristics; and finally, the study clarified the influence path of paradoxical leadership on employee creativity from the perspective of employees′ psychology, that is, creative self-efficacy. This research established a theoretical model of these four variables based on Social Information Processing theory and the Conservation of Resources theory. We used three methods to collect data from May 2021 to October 2021. A total of 824 questionnaires were distributed in this study, and 303 valid questionnaires were finally recovered, with an effective rate of 36.77%. We used SPSS22.0 software for empirical research. The research found that: employee creative self-efficacy plays a partial mediating role in the relationship between challenging time pressure and creativity, while it plays a full mediating role in the relationship between threatening time pressure and creativity. Time pressure can affect employees′ belief in their ability to achieve creative results, which in turn affects creativity. Leaders should respond to the potential causes of creativity in work situations and enhance employee creativity in a timely manner. In addition to job situational factors such as assigning work tasks appropriately to employees and using paradoxical leadership styles, emphasis should be placed on controlling the time pressure in the workplace. Employee creative self-efficacy is a complete mediator between paradoxical leadership and creativity. This proves that in innovative enterprises in China, paradoxical leadership, as the social source of the organization′s environment and information, can affect employees′ attitudes and behaviors at work, and thus have an impact on employee creative self-efficacy and creativity. This study took employee creative self-efficacy as a mediating variable, and expanded the research path to "objective factors in the workplace--employee psychological factors--employee behavior". Managers should pay attention to the resource mechanism of employees′ psychology when time pressure and paradoxical leadership affect employee creativity. When leaders try to improve creativity from the perspective of time pressure and paradoxical leadership, they should pay attention to whether these measures can improve employee creative self-efficacy, so as to improve the accuracy of the countermeasures to promote employee creativity. Employee creative self-efficacy negatively moderates the relationship between challenging time pressure and creativity. That is, when creative self-efficacy is strong, the positive effect of challenging time pressure on creativity is weaker, and vice versa. This study will enrich academic research on the impact of workplace contextual factors on employee creativity from a psychological perspective. When managers stimulate employees′ challenging time pressure to promote employee creativity, it should be noted that challenging time pressure will be affected by the boundary condition, that is, employee creative self-efficacy. Specifically, leaders should match the type of time pressure with the strength of employee creative self-efficacy, and should adopt different management strategies and coordinate with different compensation systems for different employees.

Key words: time pressure, paradoxical leadership, creative self-efficacy, creativity