The influence of teleworking on creative performance by employees with high academic training: The mediating role of work autonomy, self-efficacy, and creative self-efficacy

This paper aims to evaluate the effect of teleworking on the creativity of professional employees via three mediating variables: work autonomy, self-efficacy, and creative self-efficacy. The research applies a quantitative-correlational design. The sample is made up of 448 employees evaluated online. From the results, what stands out is that teleworking is an ideal scenario for employees with high academic training to expand their creative performance. In fact, work autonomy, self-efficacy and creative self-efficacy are three characteristics related to the task or to the worker’s personality, which intensifies the relationship between teleworking and creativity by acting as a labor resource. In addition, working two or more days a week remotely is associated with stable creativity. However, low intensity teleworking, specifically if it is on one day a week only, decreases the self-perception of creative performance considerably. Lastly, the results also reveal gender differences in creative self-assessment, in such a way that women are significantly less aware of their ideas being original than men are, especially when teleworking only occurs on one day a week.