We argue that creativity is influenced by the dynamic interplay of positive and negative affect: High creativity results if a person experiences an episode of negative affect that is followed by a ...decrease in negative affect and an increase in positive affect, a process referred to as an "affective shift." An experience-sampling study with 102 full-time employees provided support for the hypotheses. An experimental study with 80 students underlined the proposed causal effect of an affective shift on creativity. We discuss practical implications for facilitating creativity in organizations.
We argue that other peoples' failures provide a neglected source of managerial learning that is associated with enhanced learning transfer. Due to their negative valence, stories about other peoples' ...failures as compared to stories about other peoples' successes should elicit a more pronounced motivational response, such that people elaborate the content of failure stories more actively. As a consequence, the knowledge gained from failure stories will more likely be applied on a transfer task. We expect this motivational response to failure stories and its benefits for learning to be most pronounced for people who view failures as valuable learning opportunities. We report an experimental study, in which participants were exposed to a managerial training with stories about either managerial successes or managerial failures that delivered the same learning content. Results showed that stories about managerial failures led to more elaboration and learning transfer, in particular for participants who see the learning potential of failures. We discuss how failure stories can be used to stimulate managerial learning in educational and organizational settings.
Innovation, the development and intentional introduction of new and useful ideas by individuals, teams, and organizations, lies at the heart of human adaptation. Decades of research in different ...disciplines and at different organizational levels have produced a wealth of knowledge about how innovation emerges and the factors that facilitate and inhibit innovation. We propose that this knowledge needs integration. In an initial step toward this goal, we apply a dialectic perspective on innovation to overcome limitations of dichotomous reasoning and to gain a more valid account of innovation. We point out that individuals, teams, and organizations need to self-regulate and manage conflicting demands of innovation and that multiple pathways can lead to idea generation and innovation. By scrutinizing the current use of the concept of organizational ambidexterity and extending it to individuals and teams, we develop a framework to help guide and facilitate future research and practice. Readers expecting specific and universal prescriptions of how to innovate will be disappointed as current research does not allow such inferences. Rather, we think innovation research should focus on developing and testing principles of innovation management in addition to developing decision aids for organizational practice. To this end, we put forward key propositions and action principles of innovation management.
This article attempts to move beyond the contradictions regarding the motivational effects of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy beliefs are viewed as the conscious reflection of an implicit process of ...self-motivation that occurs as a response to the perception of increased demands. A positive rate of change in self-efficacy beliefs, rather than a steady state of self-efficacy, indicates self-motivation and is associated with positive motivational consequences. It is argued that the oscillating interplay of demand-perception and self-motivation is linked to the dynamics of positive and negative affect. The theoretical model can account for the conflicting findings that exist with regard to the motivational consequences of self-efficacy and opens an agenda for future research.
Although situational judgment tests have been found to be valid predictors of performance, they have rarely been used to measure particular constructs. In this study, we apply the situational ...judgment test method to the measurement of personal initiative, a construct defined as situated action. We used respondents' situated preferences in mental simulations of work scenarios as formative indicators of their overall level of personal initiative at work. Results from a validation study showed that the situational judgment test of personal initiative (SJT‐PI) had adequate validity and complemented a Likert‐type self‐report measure of personal initiative in predicting behavioral criteria. Situated preferences for personal initiative were hypothesized to be proximal predictors of actual behavior and were accordingly found to mediate the relationship between generalized self‐efficacy, felt responsibility, and actual behavior. Furthermore, situated preferences for personal initiative could be differentiated empirically from organizational citizenship behavior. We conclude that situational judgment tests are a promising method for measuring personal initiative and may be a general means of improving the validity of measurement in organizations.
We examine the influence of chronobiological processes on creativity, specifically the influence of a person's chronotype. Chronotype refers to the setting of a person's biological clock that gives ...rise to a distinctive pattern of sleep habits and preferred diurnal activity. We propose a synchrony effect and predict that people are creative when the external clock is aligned with their internal, biological clock. According to our model, positive mood and creative self-efficacy act as affective and cognitive mechanisms of this synchrony effect. We present three studies that test our theorizing: a quasi-experimental field study with 260 employees, a day-reconstruction study with 238 employees, and a one-day experience sampling study with 319 employees. Across the studies, we find that chronotype moderates the effect of time of day on creativity. Overall, late chronotypes were more creative in the late afternoon and early chronotypes tended to be more creative in the morning. The alignment between chronotype and time of day also gave rise to positive mood and creative self-efficacy; however, the studies provide only partial support for the hypothesis that positive mood acts as a mediating mechanism. We discuss the implications of these findings against the background of an embodied cognition perspective on creativity.
We present a dynamic account of self-efficacy in entrepreneurship that integrates social-cognitive and control theory. According to our dynamic account, variability in self-efficacy energizes action ...because it involves self-motivation and discrepancy perception as competing motivational processes. We argue that variability and the average level in self-efficacy nascent entrepreneurs display over time support the enactment of entrepreneurial intentions and predict business ownership. The proposed positive effect of variability further implies an inverted u-shaped relationship between self-efficacy at a single point in time and business ownership. To test these hypotheses, we repeatedly assessed entrepreneurial self-efficacy of nascent African entrepreneurs during a 12-week entrepreneurship training program (total N = 241). Twelve months later, we assessed business ownership (total N = 190). We found that variability and the average level in entrepreneurial self-efficacy participants displayed during the training program were positively related to business ownership. Furthermore, for participants with strong entrepreneurial intentions, we found an inverted u-shaped relationship between entrepreneurial self-efficacy after the training program and business ownership. The study suggests that social-cognitive and control theory highlight different facets of self-regulation that both need to be accounted for to explain goal achievement in entrepreneurship.
This study investigates antecedents of procrastination, the tendency to delay the initiation or completion of work activities. We examine this phenomenon from a self-regulation perspective and argue ...that depleted self-regulatory resources are an important pathway to explain why and when employees procrastinate. The restoration of self-regulatory resources during episodes of non-work is a prerequisite for the ability to initiate action at work. As sleep offers the opportunity to replenish self-regulatory resources, employees should procrastinate more after nights with low-quality sleep and shorter sleep duration. We further propose that people’s social sleep lag amplifies this relationship. Social sleep lag arises if individuals’ preference for sleep and wake times, known as their chronotype, is misaligned with their work schedule. Over five consecutive workdays, 154 participants completed a diary study comprising online questionnaires. Multilevel analyses showed that employees procrastinated less on days when they had slept better. The more employees suffered from social sleep lag, the more they procrastinated when sleep quality was low. Day-specific sleep duration, by contrast, was not related to procrastination. We discuss the role of sleep for procrastination in the short run and relate our findings to research highlighting the role of sleep for well-being in the long run.
Research on the link between affect and creativity rests on the assumption that creativity unfolds as a stimulus-driven response to affective states. We challenge this assumption and examine whether ...personality dynamics moderate the relationships between positive and negative mood with creativity.
According to our model, personality dynamics that generate and maintain positive affect and downregulate negative affect energize creativity. Based on this model, we expect high creativity in response to negative mood if people engage in self-motivation and achieve a reduction in negative mood. We further derive that individual differences in action versus state orientation moderate the within-person relationship between mood and creativity.
We conducted an experience-sampling study and examined the relationship between mood and creativity in everyday work-life. Two hundred and ten participants indicated their action-state orientation and reported their mood three times a day over five consecutive workdays. At noon of each day, we assessed self-motivation and in the evening the extent to which participants had generated novel and useful ideas during the day.
We observed high creativity when negative mood declined and self-motivation was high. Action-state orientation moderated the within-person relationships of positive and negative mood with creativity.
Personality dynamics determine whether positive and negative mood result in creativity.
On the basis of self-regulation theories, the authors develop an affective shift model of work engagement according to which work engagement emerges from the dynamic interplay of positive and ...negative affect. The affective shift model posits that negative affect is positively related to work engagement if negative affect is followed by positive affect. The authors applied experience sampling methodology to test the model. Data on affective events, mood, and work engagement was collected twice a day over 9 working days among 55 software developers. In support of the affective shift model, negative mood and negative events experienced in the morning of a working day were positively related to work engagement in the afternoon if positive mood in the time interval between morning and afternoon was high. Individual differences in positive affectivity moderated within-person relationships. The authors discuss how work engagement can be fostered through affect regulation.
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