Corporations intent on making
employees more engaged and creative are focusing on happiness as the answer.
Chief Happiness Officer is an actual job at many companies. But most scientists
say that creativity calls on persistence and problem-solving skills, not
positivity. Researchers at Kent University and Sussex University in England dug
through through over half century of study on the creative process in various
fields, and isolated 14 components of creativity. Happiness wasn’t one of them.
Creativity is complex. The 14 components they found all need to work together
to varying degrees depending on the task at hand, the researchers explain. None
is more important than any other although different creative activities (and
different steps of a single creative effort) may demand more of one or another
and build on each other.
Psychologists at the University
of North Texas Department of Management divided creativity into two phases;
initial idea generation and subsequent problem-solving. Their review of
research on feelings and creativity concluded that a positive mood is useful
when first brainstorming, processing information, and coming up with as many
ideas as possible—you don’t want to bring judgment into that, because it could
stifle idea generation. But rigor is the key to overcoming obstacles and
completing tasks—and good mood doesn’t improve problem-solving, which involves
judgments that almost by necessity won’t feel good: critique and evaluation,
experimentation and failure. The stress that arises from problems may be
unpleasant but it also motivates us to complete tasks. In other words, negative
emotions are actually beneficial to the creative process.
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