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Schmalenbach Business Review
Published in: Schmalenbach Business Review 3-4/2016

10-10-2016 | Original Article

Give Me a Goal to be Creative: Investigating Goal Setting and Creative Performance

Authors: Stefanie Ringelhan, Jutta Stumpf-Wollersheim, Andreas Ostermaier, Isabell M. Welpe, Matthias Spörrle

Published in: Schmalenbach Business Review | Issue 3-4/2016

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Abstract

Taking into account the dual pathway to creativity model, we conducted an experiment (N = 101) to investigate the influence of goals on creative performance aspects (cognitive persistence, creative fluency, cognitive flexibility, originality and appropriateness). Our experiment revealed that having an assigned goal versus having no goal caused anger to outweigh happiness, which led to more cognitive persistence and creative fluency. We observed no influence on cognitive flexibility and originality. An assigned goal led to less appropriate ideas than having no goal, but this effect was not mediated by emotions. Our findings suggest that goals should be applied depending on whether open-minded in-depth ideation or appropriate ideas are desired.
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Footnotes
1
Note that we use the term “creative performance” (rather than creativity) here to emphasize that creativity consists of different facets: cognitive persistence, creative fluency, cognitive flexibility, originality and appropriateness.
 
2
We refer to “discrete emotions” rather than moods because the emotional reaction to a specific incident is investigated (Lindebaum and Jordan 2014).
 
3
Note that we collected these data in addition to explore potential effects of participative goal setting on creative performance. To enable such an investigation, in one experimental condition, we instructed the participants to specify how many ideas they intended to generate within the given period of eight minutes. Although the participants were allowed to determine the goal by themselves, we asked them to ensure that the goal was difficult, but realistic to achieve. For the study reported in this manuscript, we excluded these data from our sample prior to analyses. However, we conducted supplementary ex-post analyses regarding potential indirect effects of a participative vs. no goal setting on creative performance through the difference in emotions. All indirect effects that we analyzed were insignificant.
 
4
The number of the final sample is larger than the number of the overall sample subtracted by the number of excluded cases because some cases were dropped for more than one of the mentioned reasons.
 
5
We conducted a pilot study with N = 22 participants to assess the average number of ideas to be generated in eight minutes. One participant missed the topic and was therefore excluded from the analysis of the pilot study.
 
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Metadata
Title
Give Me a Goal to be Creative: Investigating Goal Setting and Creative Performance
Authors
Stefanie Ringelhan
Jutta Stumpf-Wollersheim
Andreas Ostermaier
Isabell M. Welpe
Matthias Spörrle
Publication date
10-10-2016
Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Published in
Schmalenbach Business Review / Issue 3-4/2016
Print ISSN: 1439-2917
Electronic ISSN: 2194-072X
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s41464-016-0022-7

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