Another tip on how to be more creative:
enerally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking," says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario. She and colleagues Rahel Rabi and John Paul Minda carried out a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. For this study, Nadler and her colleagues looked at a particular kind of learning that is improved by creative thinking. And: Happy volunteers were better at…
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Are Hopeful Employees More Creative?
studied how employees' hope explains their creativity at work, both directly and through the mediation of happiness. One hundred and twenty-five individuals reported their hope and happiness, their supervisors having reported their creativity. Factor analyses suggested two hope factors (waypower; composite hope) and three creativity dimensions (novel ideas; creative ideas; ideas championing). The main findings were the following: (a) the composite hope predicted all creativity dimensions, the waypower dimension predicted only the ideas championing dimension; and (b) the composite…
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Want to be more creative? Move.
search suggests that living in and adapting to foreign cultures facilitates creativity. The current research investigated whether one aspect of the adaptation process—multicultural learning—is a critical component of increased creativity. Experiments 1-3 found that recalling a multicultural learning experience: (a) facilitates idea flexibility (e.g., the ability to solve problems in multiple ways), (b) increases awareness of underlying connections and associations, and (c) helps overcome functional fixedness. Importantly, Experiments 2 and 3 specifically demonstrated that functional learning in a multicultural context…
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Can witnessing rudeness make you less creative?
three experimental studies, we found that witnessing rudeness enacted by an authority figure (Studies 1 and 3) and a peer (Study 2) reduced observers’ performance on routine tasks as well as creative tasks. In all three studies we also found that witnessing rudeness decreased citizenship behaviors and increased dysfunctional ideation. Negative affect mediated the relationships between witnessing rudeness and performance. The results of Study 3 show that competition with the victim over scarce resources moderated the relationship between observing…
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Want to increase creativity and innovation? Get on a plane.
ile business surveys often find that managers prefer face-to-face communication for negotiating deals and selling their product, there is reason to believe that face-to-face meetings are particularly important for the transfer of technology, because technology is best explained and demonstrated in person. This paper examines the role of inward business travelers in raising a country's rate of innovation by looking at business travel from the United States to seventy-four other countries during the years 1993-2003. We find that international business…
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