مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد خوش بینی و بدبینی به عنوان پیش گوی خلاقیت کارمند – امرالد 2017

Workplace creativity (i.e. “products, services, business models, work methods, or management processes that are novel and useful”; Zhou and Hoever, 2014, p. 335) is “the starting point and the root” of organizational innovation (Yeh-Yun Lin and Liu, 2012, p. 56). Considering that both creativity and innovation are important determinants of successful organizational performance and longer-term survival (Anderson et al., 2014; Kyvik et al., 2012; Simmons and Sower, 2012; Tung, 2016), studying the antecedents of workplace creativity is an important research endeavor. Creativity may unfold at the organizational, team, and individual levels (Anderson et al., 2014), and this paper focuses on antecedents of individual creativity (i.e. it adopts an actor-centered approach). Specifically, we test how the ratio between employees’ optimism and pessimism predicts their creativity. Optimism represents a tendency to believe that good things, as opposed to bad ones, will occur, while pessimism represents a tendency to believe that bad things will occur (Carver et al., 2010; Luthans et al., 2015). Consequently, optimists tend to see desired outcomes as attainable and to persevere in their goal-directed activities, while pessimists are more likely to become passive and give up on achieving their goals (Carver et al., 2010). A possible consequence of this difference is that, as we discuss later in the paper, optimists tend to be more creative (Rego et al., 2012a; Seligman, 2011), while pessimists tend to be less creative. This reasoning is based mainly on the assumption that optimism and pessimism represent opposite poles of the same construct. However, as we discuss later, optimism and pessimism may be considered as being two different constructs (Burke et al., 2000; Herzberg et al., 2006; Lopes et al., 2011; Robinson-Whelen et al., 1997) and individuals may be characterized by idiosyncratic levels of optimism and pessimism. Moreover, there is some evidence suggesting that pessimism is not always an obstacle to creativity, as it is sometimes assumed to be (Charyton et al., 2009; Park, 2016); and in certain circumstances, optimism may be detrimental to performance and creativity (Charyton et al., 2009; Icekson et al., 2014). It is sometimes said that the optimist sees opportunities in every problem and the pessimist sees problems in every opportunity (Hmieleski and Baron, 2009). However, seeing opportunities in every problem is not necessarily conducive to creative (i.e. new and useful; Oldham and Cummings, 1996) ideas if, for example, the individual does not face the problem realistically and does not prepare to proactively reduce the likelihood of undesired outcomes (Shepperd et al., 2006; Sweeny et al., 2006). Moreover, pessimistically seeing the problem in every opportunity does not necessarily preclude being creative if the individual is also optimistic enough to continue striving and to cope actively with the problems encountered, thereby being more creative.