Psychological Well-Being and Innovative Work Behavior Among ICT Employees in Türkiye: Comparing the Mediating Roles of Creative Self-Efficacy and Subjective Vitality.

Innovation is an everyday imperative in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, yet the psychological conditions through which well-being is associated with innovative action remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates whether subjective vitality and creative self-efficacy constitute distinct psychological pathways-an energy-based and a belief-based mechanism, respectively-through which psychological well-being becomes associated with innovative work behavior, thereby providing a more differentiated examination of the assumption that psychologically healthy employees are more likely to behave innovatively. An online survey was administered to 463 ICT-sector employees in Türkiye, and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test direct and indirect relationships with comprehensive assessment of measurement quality, predictive relevance, and effect sizes. Creative self-efficacy emerged as a meaningful indirect pathway linking psychological well-being to innovative work behavior, whereas subjective vitality, though strongly predicted by well-being, showed no significant relationship with innovative outcomes. These findings suggest that not all positive psychological states are equally innovation-relevant: among ICT employees, the indirect association between well-being and innovation was evident through employees' confidence in their own creative capability rather than through feelings of psychological energy-a distinction with meaningful implications for both theory and practice in knowledge-intensive, digitally dynamic organizations.