The Emotive Roots of Creativity

Creativity helps to deal with changes in the environment, and with the opportunities and threats of everyday life. Being creative helps to sustain and promote a positive mood and sense of well being, it makes people more attractive mating partners, and it helps them to win conflicts and debates. Creativity also is core to successful entrepreneurship, and to companies establishing and expanding their market share. Creativity is intimately connected with innovation, and innovations are of great importance to organizational effectiveness and survival. To achieve creativity, managers and organizational leaders collectively believe employees should feel relaxed and positive, distracted from their day-to-day hassles, and free to explore and venture out into the great wide open. In social and organizational psychology, creative performance is commonly decomposed into fluency, originality, and flexibility. Fluency refers to the generated number of non-redundant ideas, insights, problem solutions, or products. Originality is one of the defining characteristics of creativity and refers to the uncommonness or infrequency of the ideas, insights, problem solutions, or products that are being invented. Flexibility manifests itself in the use of different cognitive categories and perspectives, and the use of broad and inclusive cognitive categories.