Store creativity mediating the relationship between affective tone and performance

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to show how store positive affective tone predicts store performance (i.e. sales achievement) through creativity, and how store negative affective tone enhances the relationship between positive affective tone and creativity. Design/methodology/approach: A sample of 94 stores of a Brazilian retail chain is used to test the model. Store supervisors reported (October 2011) the store's affective tone and creativity relative to the last six months. Three periods are considered for measuring performance: the last six months (May to October 2011), the preceding four months (January to April 2011), and the subsequent semester (November 2011 to April 2012). Findings: The main findings are: positive affective tone predicts the stores' performance through the mediating role of creativity, even after controlling the effects of preceding stores' performance; negative affective tone makes the relationship between positive affective tone and creativity stronger. Originality/value: The paper empirically validates theory suggesting that creativity may be a source of retail stores' competitive advantage, and shows that fostering positive affective tone may be a pathway to promote creativity. The paper also suggests that negative affective tone is not necessarily a "problem"; rather, it can be used to enhance the favorable impact of positive affective tone upon creativity. These are important contributions for the retailing literature, considering that creativity (mainly at the team and organizational level) in that field is understudied. It is also an important contribution to the literature on the services sector, in which research on creativity is scarce.