Emotions as Constraining and Facilitating Factors for Creativity: Companionate Love and Anger

Abstract

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.

The role of creativity in mediating the relationship between entrepreneurial passion and entrepreneurial alertness

“…Based on the results obtained from this study, evidence shows that passion for inventing is significantly linked to creativity, coinciding with previous results (Cardon et al, 2013;Luh & Lu, 2012). However, these results cannot be considered definite, since previous research has found that negative affect also influences creativity (Bledow et al, 2013;Yang & Hung, 2015). Empirical evidence from different sources supports the assumption that negative affect can contribute to creativity.…”

“…Along the same lines, Hayton and Cholakova (2012) mention that affect not only influences creativity through the generation of business ideas, it also influences the intent to improve them. However, evidence contradicting these results has also been found, and negative affect also stimulates creativity under certain circumstances (Bledow, Rosing & Frese, 2013;George & Zhou, 2002, 2007Kaufmann, 2015;Kaufmann & Vosburg, 2002;Yang & Hung, 2015). Therefore, it is still impossible to generalize the relationship between positive affect and creativity.…”

The effect of creative corporate culture and intangibility on the performance of foreign firms traded on the NYSE

“…It should be pointed out that in our sample, EFCR had no effect on creative corporate culture (Model 1), a finding supported by the literature, according to which crises and financial restrictions at the organizational level have a positive impact on creativity as firms resort to innovation in the hope of turning business around (Yang and Hung, 2015).…”

Crafting better team climate: the benefits of using creative methods during team initiation

“…The participants and control groups in this study are MBA students. Recent research on creative team process has shown that empirical results from student samples can inform the work of innovation managers in the design thinking and creativity domain (Amabile et al, 2005;Bissola et al, 2014;Seidel and Fixson, 2013;Yang and Hung, 2015). With respect to generalisability of findings from a student sample, Chiocchio and Essiembre (2009, p.386) note that "teams of undergraduate and graduate students are as real as any other type of teams".…”