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How expected evaluation influences creativity: Regulatory focus as moderator

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Abstract

Two studies investigated the effect of expected evaluation and regulatory focus on individuals’ creative performance. In both studies, first, the type of evaluation (informational versus controlling) was manipulated, and then regulatory focus was measured as an individual difference (in Study 1) or induced as a state using a pencil-and-paper maze task (in Study 2). Results provided evidence that participants who expect an informational evaluation were more likely to adopt an eager strategy; whereas participants who expected a controlling evaluation were more likely to adopt a vigilant strategy. Furthermore, participants in promotion-informational and prevention-controlling groups (regulatory fit conditions) performed more creatively than those in promotion-controlling and prevention-informational groups (regulatory non-fit conditions). In sum, the present findings contribute to a better understanding of how external evaluations and basic motivational orientations influence creative performance.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

    Jia Wang & Ru-De Liu

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, Department of Psychology, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100080, China

    Ling Wang

  3. Beijing Siyuan Xingye Real Estate Brokerage Co., Ltd., Beijing, China

    Hui-Zhen Dong

Authors
  1. Jia Wang
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  2. Ling Wang
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  3. Ru-De Liu
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  4. Hui-Zhen Dong
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ling Wang.

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Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Appendix

Appendix

Instruction of the informational evaluation

Later, experts in human resources will carefully review your ideas in this task. We need this review as part of the study. We will provide you with a copy so that you can learn from this study, since we have their evaluations. They may tell you what they liked about your responses and/or suggest alternative approaches or improvements on what you did. I’m sure each of you will find this information useful because creative problem solving is highly valued and will help you in the real world. Anyone can solve problems by coming up with typical solutions, the same old thing everyone else would suggest, but the employee who is creative and offers unique ideas stands out. So, the feedback from the evaluators will help you learn something that will be useful beyond this study and beyond the school setting. Now, remember we are interested in you trying to be creative. I will be asking you later for an address where I can mail the reviews to you.

Instruction of the controlling evaluation

Now, you have a creativity goal, and we expect you to be creative. This is vitally important to us, and we expect you to generate creative ideas for this study. In fact, your data is needed to complete this study. Now you are going to be judged on how creative you are by experts in human resources, so they are knowledgeable and tough. These experts will critically evaluate your performance in this task by analyzing every thought you have in the memo and judging if it is creative or not. We will send you your score so that you know if you performed as you should have. You’ll be sent your score and told how your score compared to what we wanted. Remember, you should be creative. I will be asking you later for an address where I can mail your score to you.

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Wang, J., Wang, L., Liu, RD. et al. How expected evaluation influences creativity: Regulatory focus as moderator. Motiv Emot 41, 147–157 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9598-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-016-9598-y

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