Jacob Eisenberg

Workplace Affect and Workplace Creativity: A Review and Preliminary Model

Workplace creativity has important organizational and individual implications, and workplace affect seems to influence creative performance on the job. Across studies, however, research examining the relationship between affect and creative performance has yielded inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. Creativity has been found to be significantly related to positive affective states in some research, but has been tied to negative affective states in others. Various moderators and mediators of affective influences on creativity have been examined in 1 or 2 studies, but systematic reviews and integrative models of research on affect influences on creativity are lacking. In this article, we review the existing research on affect and creative performance and present a theoretical model designed to help integrate results across studies. Implications of our model for future research and for the management of workplace creativity are discussed.

The Effects of competition on improvisers' motivation, stress, and creative performance

We explored how competition affects the quality of musical improvisation, as well as the intrinsic motivation and stress reported by improvisers. Amateur musicians improvised on a keyboard in one of two conditions: induced competition and no competition. Employing the consensual assessment technique, improvisations were assessed for creativity and technical goodness by 10 expert judges. Findings indicate that improvisations were judged as more creative under competitive than non-competitive conditions. Moreover, improvisers in the competition condition were more intrinsically motivated, as well as more stressed, than improvisers in the no competition condition. The creativity and technical goodness dimensions of improvisations were positively related to each other. The findings are discussed in light of the intense debate over the effects of extrinsic motivators on intrinsic motivation and creativity and offer mechanisms through which competition may affect creative performance as well as discuss the role of stress in affecting motivation and creativity.

Measurement Invariance of the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire Across Three Countries

In recent years, pay satisfaction has been increasingly studied in an international context, prompting the importance of examining whether the Pay Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ) is invariant across countries other than the United States. This study investigated the measurement invariance across three countries, namely, the United States (N = 321), Belgium (N = 301), and Cyprus (N = 132). Results showed that the measurement structure of the PSQ was invariant across these different countries because there was no departure from measurement invariance in terms of factor form, factor pattern coefficients, factor variances, and factor covariances. These results show promise for the equivalence of PSQ ratings across different countries. Future research is needed to test the equivalence further across other countries and samples.

La influencia de las redes sociales en la adaptación de los trabajadores al cambio tecnológico

Resumen En este trabajo examinamos el papel de tres tipos de redes sociales: la de apoyo, la informacional y la de amistad, sobre la adaptacion individual a un cambio tecnologico en una entidad financiera. Utilizando un diseno basado en un cuestionario con 371 empleados pertenecientes a 133 sucursales y la valoracion de los directivos de una entidad financiera hemos encontrado algunos aspectos novedosos que relacionan la red social abierta con la calidad de la adaptacion de los trabajadores a un nuevo sistema tecnologico. Especificamente, hemos encontrado que el tamano de la red de apoyo y la densidad de la red informacional predicen significativamente la adaptacion al nuevo sistema. Para finalizar el trabajo se discuten las implicaciones teoricas de la importancia de la investigacion sobre redes sociales abiertas para la adaptacion de los trabajadores a los cambios organizativos, asi como se identifican las implicaciones para los profesionales implicados en tales cambios.

Chapter 7 The Role of Cognition and Attitude in Driving Behavior: Elaborating on Affective Events Theory

Affective Events Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) proposes a theoretical framework that outlines the structure, antecedents, and consequences of affective experiences at work. We elaborate on Affective Events Theory by incorporating recent theory of attitude and by further exploring the role of work environment features within the model. Our proposed model acknowledges the immediacy of judgment driven as well as affect-driven behavior. It provides a mechanism through which affect-driven or judgment-driven behaviors can be more easily predicted and it shows how work environment features not only make certain events more or less likely but also influence resulting behaviors through attitude formation. We outline the practical application of our model and give direction for future research.

The Relationship between Affect and Creativity in Organizations: the Roles of Affect Characteristics, Neuro-cognitive Mechanisms and Task Type

The nature of affect and creativity relationship has been under debate, with some studies pointing out that positive affect is conducive, while others arguing that positive affect is detrimental to creative performance. In order to clarify the complicated affect-creativity relationship, we examine several factors that have not been sufficiently looked at: the role of affect characteristics (e.g., temporal factors), neuro-cognitive mechanisms (e.g., set-breaking), and the type of creative task performed (e.g., requiring negative versus positive creativity). To improve our understanding of seemingly inconsistent previous findings, we offer a model that links affect, through a set of mediators and moderators, to creative performance in organizations, accompanying our analysis with a set of 14 testable propositions.