Introduction
Feedback is one of the most powerful forces and common practices used, not just in professional environments but also in everyone’s private lives. We all seek from and provide feedback to people around us, whether colleagues or friends (Anseel, Lievens and Levy, 2007). Feedback helps people achieve academic (Vandewalle, 1997), career (Renn and Fedor, 2001) or relationship goals (Fitzsimons and Bargh, 2003). Another increasingly relevant application of feedback is in the field of creativity (Zhou, 2008). Creativity in the form of ideas is the inception of product development which is among the essential processes for success, survival, and renewal of organizations, particularly for firms in either fast-paced or competitive markets (Brown and Eisenhardt, 1995). In the context of work, creativity is possible in any job and by any employee (Shalley, Gilson and Blum, 2000). More and more time is being spent in managerial research investigating ways to manage creativity (Sutton, 2002).
While early creativity research mainly focused on creativity as an individual personality trait (see Barron & Harrington, 1981, for a review) more recent perspectives in creativity tend to concentrate on how contextual and social factors can affect an individual's creative activity (Amabile 1988, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin, 1993). A successful “social psychology of creativity” (Amabile, 1996) requires that the creative individual is situated in a network of interpersonal relationships (Simonton, 1984). Feedback is of these contextual factors that is the most frequently used in organizations (Ilgen, Fisher and Taylor, 1979) and has been shown to have a significant impact on creativity (Farr and Ford, 1990; George and Zhou, 2001; Zhou, 1998; Zhou and George, 2001).
Although many components of feedback and its effects have been investigated (see Zhou, 2008 for an overview) there is still a lot that is unknown. One factor that has not been investigated at all as yet is how the relationship between the feedback giver and the feedback receiver impacts the effect of feedback on creativity. When a creative idea is developed, be it in an organizational setting or outside, typically we would present it to people that are close to us first. After all, it is important to ask someone who will listen, encourage, and maybe even offer suggestions, especially if we are insecure (Jackman and Strober, 2003). However, we do not know yet whether this positive or negative feedback from a friend is more helpful for our creativity than from a stranger. This study aims to shed light on this central question.
To test these effects, I will look at how relationship closeness between feedback giver and receiver moderates the effect of feedback valence on creative performance in an experimental setting.
A better understanding of this interaction will add another important cornerstone to Zhou’s (2008) conceptual feedback-creativity framework. In an organizational setting, better knowledge about the power of feedback in interaction with a relationship, namely closeness, will help managers to give better feedback that motivates people and hence creates a breeding ground for creative ideas to grow.
Literature research and hypothesis
Creativity
Creativity requires novelty and usefulness (Amabile, 1983). This means, by prior research, creativity is defined as the production of a novel and appropriate response, product or solution to an open-ended task. The response must be new, but it must also be useful helping to solve the problem. Also, the task must be open-ended, rather than having a single, obvious solution. This componential theory of creativity was first described by Amabile (1983) and expanded over time (Amabile, 1988, 1996, 2008). It explains the different components creativity requires. These include three within-individual components (domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant processes and task motivation) and one outside component (the social environment). Furthermore, it is important to differentiate between creativity and innovation. Whereas, the former just describes the process of idea generation, the latter involves idea generation and implementation (Amabile, 1988).
Historically, research on creativity had mainly focused on individual differences and cognitive processes. The former looks at characteristics of people who have shown creativity at their workplace – in particular, creative individuals like artists, writers or musicians – over a longer period (e.g. Simonton, 1975; Simonton, 1976a; Simonton, 1976b). Next, researchers have tried to find personality traits related to creativity (see Barron and Harrington, 1981 for an overview). The second main research area examines which cognitive processes and skills are necessary to be creative (see Reiter-Palmon and Illies, 2004 for an overview). Based on those finding, cognitive tests were developed to measure the creative process and divergent thinking (Guilford, 1959, 1963, 1967), most notably the Torrence Tests of Creative Thinking (Torrence, 1974).
Within the field of organizational creativity, current research primarily targets the contextual factors that influence creative performance (see Shalley, Zhou and Oldham, 2004 for an overview). The consensus is that a stimulating work environment is positively related to creativity (Oldham, 2003) and that a non-supportive or controlling environment hinders creativity (Amabile and Conti, 1999; Oldham and Cummings, 1996; Zhou, 2003). Leadership (Amabile et al., 2004; Shin and Zhou, 2003; Zhou, 2003; Zhou and George, 2003), coworkers (Amabile et al., 1996; Zhou, 2003; Zhou and George, 2001) and setting creative goals (Carson and Carson, 1993; Shalley, 1991, 1995) have all been found to have a stimulating effect. Another proven contextual factor – and the one I will investigate further – is feedback (Zhou, 1998).
Feedback
Feedback in management theory has already been intensively investigated. According to Ramaprasad (1983), feedback is the information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter which is used to alter the gap in some way.
Historically, research on feedback has had a strong focus on its effect on performance or productivity. In a meta-analysis, Kluger and DeNisi (1996) found inconsistent results across different studies, suggesting that the effect of feedback valence in performance depends on various factors. Smither et al., (2005) also arrived at this same conclusion. However, feedback is usually seen as a good management tool used to influence employee behaviors (Isen, Daubman and Nowicki, 1987).
To understand how feedback works, we need to distinguish between different types of feedback. Sansone (1986) separated feedback into components satisfying curiosity (task feedback) or signifying competence (positive normative feedback). Hattie and Timperley (2007) suggest a model that discriminates between four levels of feedback: the task, the processing, the regulatory, and the self-levels. Effective feedback at the task, process and self-regulatory levels are interrelated.
For research of feedback in combination with creativity, Zhou and Shalley (2008) looked at feedback valence and style, developmental orientation and person-focused versus task focused. Zhou (1998a) defines feedback valence as the positive or negative outcome of the comparison between an individual’s creativity and normative or situational criteria. A positive feedback valence would mean that the person’s idea is more creative than the criteria. If the idea is less creative than the criteria, the feedback valence would be negative.
Zhou’s research has also discovered the benefits of positive feedback on creativity (Zhou, 1998). This effect is enhanced when feedback is delivered in an informal style (Zhou, 1998), and when the surrounding feedback/help from coworkers and perceived organizational support were high (Zhou and George, 2001). Additionally, Fodor and Greenier
(1995) demonstrated that individuals high in motivation are strongly influenced by positive feedback too.
The reasons that positive feedback leads to increased creativity are found in its implication on the person’s perceived competence. Higher perceived competence, especially when delivered in an informational style, would then consequently increase intrinsic motivation (Deci, Koestner and Ryan, 1999), thus resulting in greater creativity.
How feedback influences creativity
Before we look at our moderating effect, we need to examine the relationship between feedback and creativity more carefully. Zhou and Shalley (2008) present four key reasons that explain the impact of creativity-related feedback on employee creativity.
First, creativity relies heavily on intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1996), a state that can be created by well-designed feedback (Harackiewicz, 1979). The intrinsic motivation perspective of creativity states that an individual is motivated and energized by the task itself rather than an external reward that is gained through the outcome (Runco and Jaeger, 2012). An intrinsically motivated person tends to be curious and learning oriented (Boggiano, Ruble, & Pittman, 1982), cognitively flexible (Deci & Ryan, 1980, 1985), willing to take risks (McGraw & Fiala, 1982), and persistent when faced with obstacles and challenges (Utman, 1997). All of these should increase the odds of coming up with creative ideas.
Second, feedback can help employees determine whether an idea is creative. As creativity is hard to measure, it is often difficult to measure to which extent an idea or approach is creative (Zhou, 1998b). This is even more relevant for individuals who do not have experience in coming up with creative ideas (Zhou, 2003). Therefore, feedback can be a good indicator that helps the feedback receiver to understand and internalize standards for creative work.
Third, feedback can influence an employee’s mood. Getting feedback has a positive effect on two main mood dimensions: Pleasantness and arousal (Kluger, Lewinsohn and Aiello, 1994). The mood felt then has further on creativity. The following effect of mood on creativity is supported by a large number of studies (see Davis, 2009 for an overview).
Isen et al. (1987) demonstrated with four experiments that an induced positive mood improved performance in some creative tasks. Nonetheless, there is also research that calls those findings into question. Kaufmann & Vosburg (1997) found that a positive mood had a detrimental effect on problem-solving performance compared to a neutral or negative mood. Therefore, it seems that both positive and negative moods enhance creativity under different conditions; this led to the development of a dual process theory (see Kaufmann, 2015 for an overview).
Fourth, feedback helps to acquire the necessary creative skills and strategies. As Creativity-relevant skills and strategies are needed to be creative (Amabile 1996), Zhou (2003) argues that feedback helps to gain those skills and strategies. By having them, one is more likely to identify the right problem, generate ideas and evaluates and redefines those ideas. With these mediating effects that influence creativity we are now able to make a connection to relationship closeness and see how they are affected by it.
Relationship closeness in the context of creativity and feedback
Interpersonal relationships are a social construct that has interested psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and philosophers equally for many years. They are defined by different reciprocal behaviors and are developed over time along two dimensions: breadth of penetration (amount of interaction, information exchange etc.) and depth of penetration (intimacy of interaction etc.) (Taylor, 1968). Although interpersonal relationships exist on a continuum of closeness, in the following experiment I differentiate between strangers, acquaintances and friends. This is in line with previous research (Austin, 1980, Jehn and Shah, 1997) and simplifies the explanation.
A strong bond between two individuals that is marked by reciprocation and has the intent to facilitate the reach of socioemotional goals is called a friendship (Hartup and Stevens, 1997; Hinde, 1987; Youniss, 1980). One of its main characteristics is its egalitarianism and the fact that both people have to be attracted to each other (Rubin, Bukowski and Laursen, 2009). Also, conventionally, friendships are not family, which means that they are free of predetermined role prescriptions that often characterize family relations (De Vries, 1996). Friendships are therefore defined by their non-ascribed and socially unregulated quality (Aries and Johnson, 1983). Reliable predictors of friendship are values, interests, and background while residential proximity and working together only showed very modest associations to friendship (Johnson, 1989). An acquaintance is defined as someone that is known through casual encounters but without a strong bond, long mutual history or many shared values or interests (Jehn and Shah, 1997). As a stranger, I define someone who is at the very bottom of the continuum of closeness as they do not know each other at all.
In the literature, the relationship between friendship and creativity has been discussed from two perspectives: From a more quantitative sociological/organizational side and a more qualitative psychological side. Concerning the former, there has been a considerable amount of research done in the field of social networks and its influence on creativity (Perry-Smith and Shalley, 2003). Although most of the network research looked at the social relationship at the very minimal level – for example in the form of interactions with diverse people or increased communications (Kanter, 1988; Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin, 1993) – some studies also include parameters such as network tie strength (Granovetter, 1983). Granovetter (1973) first described stronger ties as relationships that are characterized by emotional closeness, frequent interactions and a reciprocated perception about the importance of the relationship. Based on this “strength of weak tie” theory, if two people know each other, those individuals meet new people, and over time a network develops where everyone knows everyone. This then leads to a convergence of opinion and views, and as a result, each would be less likely to be exposed to new perspectives when interacting with friends (Perry-Smith, 2006; Perry-Smith and Shalley, 2003), leading to a worse creative performance.
The second view looks more at the emotional and psychological value of friendship and its implications on creativity with somewhat different results. Apart from collaboration and sharing ideas, friends also play a vital role in validating and helping with self-doubt as described by Barron (1963). Friendship can offer emotional strength and confidence to increase the creative individual’s self-esteem. Safety and social validation of creative products are a primary function of friends and workplace collaborators (Cohen, 2011). Cropley (2006) mentions the importance of friends and colleagues as they can offer others a social perspective on themselves, for instance, that their ideas are not crazy but creative. Friends can create a safe space where others can test the limits of what is acceptable without the risk of feeling guilty. By doing this, they foster the courage to diverge from the norm and enable a more creative outcome.
According to Harrington (2011) anecdotal evidence shows that the myth of the independent and self-sufficient creative individual is not correct. In fact, creative people often mention a positive impact that encouragement from credible sources (such as parents, friends or mentors) had on their creative work, especially at times of unique creative challenges and stress. Individuals will feel more positively about themselves when they receive glowing feedback from friends (Jones, 1973).
Based on the above argument
s and evidence, I would predict that relationship closeness interacts with feedback valence to influence creative performance in the following way:
For the positive feedback condition I anticipate that feedback from a friend (strong relationship closeness) to have a higher positive impact triggered through the effect of intrinsic motivation. In a meta-analysis Deci, Koestner and Ryan (1999) concluded that positive feedback had a significant positive influence on intrinsic motivation. Consequently, Prabhu, Sutton and Sauser (2008) empirically tested the mediating role of intrinsic motivation on creativity. Adding to that, Nelson and DeBacker (2008) demonstrated that a good friendship related to a stronger achievement motivation. Therefore, I hypothesize:
H1: The effects of positive feedback on creative performance are higher the stronger relationship closeness is.
As for the negative feedback condition, I expect to see reverse effects and better creative performance when the feedback comes from a stranger. Receiving negative feedback from a friend is expected to have stronger negative effects on mediating factors such as intrinsic motivation (Deci and Cascio, 1972; Vallerand and Reid, 1988) and mood (Miner, Glomb and Hulin, 2005) than from a stranger. Hence, I hypothesize:
H2: The effects of negative feedback on creative performance are higher the weaker relationship closeness is.