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

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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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Notes

  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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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under Grants 01PW11006 and 01PY13012. Any opinions expressed here are those of the authors. We thank the participants of the studies and all persons involved in the project, such as our student assistants, who played a supporting role in conducting the experiment and coding the brainstorming ideas. Data for the experiment were generated from October 24th 2013 until October 29th 2013 and on February 11th and 12th 2016 at experimenTUM, laboratory for experimental research in economics, Technische Universität München, Germany.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universität München, Arcisstr. 21, 80333, München, Germany

    Stefanie Ringelhan, Jutta Stumpf-Wollersheim, Andreas Ostermaier & Isabell M. Welpe

  2. Bavarian State Institute for Higher Education Research and Planning, Prinzregentenstraße 24, 80538, München, Germany

    Isabell M. Welpe

  3. Privatuniversität Schloss Seeburg, Seeburgstraße 8, 5201, Seekirchen am Wallersee, Austria

    Matthias Spörrle

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  1. Stefanie Ringelhan
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Correspondence to Jutta Stumpf-Wollersheim.

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Ringelhan, S., Stumpf-Wollersheim, J., Ostermaier, A. et al. Give Me a Goal to be Creative: Investigating Goal Setting and Creative Performance. Schmalenbach Bus Rev 17, 337–359 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41464-016-0022-7

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