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Introduction
As the competition between companies has become increasingly heated, how to solve the problems creatively in the workplace is more important than ever before (Treffinger et al. , 2008). Employees have the natural tendency to engage in some creative activities or different creative processes while carrying out their tasks (Eschleman et al. , 2014; Zhang and Bartol, 2010a). The engagement in creative processes, namely, creative process engagement, is expected to be increasingly critical as a component for individual success (Gilson and Shalley, 2004). As a high level of job performance is the most crucial sign of success in work (Ng et al. , 2005), how creative process engagement can help employees to achieve better performance should be concerned.
However, considerable less research has focussed on the effect of employees' creative process engagement on job performance, especially their in-role performance which is required by the formal job description (Riketta, 2008). Though creative process engagement has recently appealed to the attention of some scholars, these scholars have merely regarded creative process engagement as an intervening process between leadership and creativity (Henker et al. , 2015; Zhang and Bartol, 2010a; Zhao and Gao, 2014). In fact, creative process engagement allows employees to think and deal with tasks creatively to produce novel and useful solutions to problems (Zhang and Bartol, 2010b). Therefore, this engagement may greatly influence employees' in-role performance. To fill this gap in the previous research, this study first explores the relationship between creative process engagement and in-role performance.
Due to its difference with general job engagement, creative process engagement may have specific effects on in-role performance. On the one hand, engagement in a creative activity takes more time and efforts (Shalley and Gilson, 2004), which leaves less resources for other activities (Gilson et al. , 2005). Therefore, employees' in-role performance would be negatively affected; On the other hand, resources (e.g. skills or knowledge) acquired from engaging in creative activities in one area can benefit employees in other areas (Eschleman et al. , 2014), thus leading to higher levels of in-role performance. As resources play such important roles in the relationship between creative process engagement and in-role performance, this study pays attention on one kind of resources - supervisor support and examines whether it has...