Opinion leadership types or continuous opinion leadership traits?

Opinion leadership is typically conceptualised as a continuous personality trait. However, many authors adhere to the view of qualitatively different opinion leadership types and apply arbitrary criteria to split continuous trait scores into two groups (i.e., opinion leaders vs. non‐leaders). The present study is the first to empirically evaluate this approach. A sample of N = 3812 adults (67% women) was administered a validated opinion leadership scale. Finite mixture models examined whether the latent trait distribution can be represented by a set of discrete trait levels that reflected distinct opinion leadership types. The results did not give support to a discrete typology that distinguished leaders from non‐leaders. Rather, opinion leadership was best characterised as a continuous trait.     

Selfish or servant leadership? Evolutionary predictions on leadership personalities in coordination games

We study the personalities of emergent leaders in two coordination games in groups of four players each with monetary incentives. Our results support the evolutionary hypothesis that leadership is a social good for the group: leadership benefits followers but is potentially costly for the individual taking on the leader role. Across the two economic games leaders do less well - earn less money - on average than followers. Furthermore, social participants choose to lead more often than selfish participants and there is no relationship between leadership behavior and personal dominance. Our results support the idea that leadership can be servant rather than selfish and we note the implications of this finding.     

Why do employees undertake creative action?

There is much research identifying factors that lead to a creative outcome, but little on what leads employees to begin the creative process in the first place. This research used semi‐structured interviews with 65 engineers to explore the factors and processes involved in this phenomenon. We found that general work motivation, creativity requirements, cultural support for creativity, time resources, and autonomy were all used as cues in deciding whether undertaking creative action would be worthwhile via judgmental processes of expectancy and instrumentality. We also discovered overlaps with the cognate literatures of organizational citizenship and proactivity and explore these in discussing new areas for research.     

Leaders’ receptivity to subordinates’ creative input: The role of achievement goals and composition of creative input

We identified leaders’ achievement goals and composition of creative input as important factors that can clarify when and why leaders are receptive to, and supportive of, subordinates’ creative input. As hypothesized, in two experimental studies, we found that relative to mastery goal leaders, performance goal leaders were less receptive to subordinates’ voiced creative input. In Study 1, we further showed that image threat appraisal and learning opportunity appraisal mediated this effect. In Study 2, we demonstrated that when merely creative ideas were expressed by the subordinate, performance goal leaders responded like mastery goal leaders. However, as in Study 1, performance goal leaders were less receptive to, and less supportive of, subordinates’ creative input than mastery goal leaders when the composition of subordinates’ creative input included both problem identifications and creative ideas.     

Improving organizational newcomers’ creative job performance through creative process engagement: The moderating role of a synergy diversity climate

Despite the mounting research demonstrating that employee seniority positively relates to creative job performance, we predict that a synergy diversity climate eliminates the employee seniority–creative job performance relationship by unleashing the creative potential of organizational newcomers. Drawing upon the integration-and-learning perspective for managing diversity, Study 1 finds that a synergy diversity climate moderates the relationship between employee seniority and supervisor-rated creative job performance lending support to our hypothesis. Study 2 provides an extension by showing how creative process engagement mediates this moderating effect on self-rated creative performance. Finally, Study 3 replicates and extends Study 2 by demonstrating the mediating role of creative process engagement but utilizing supervisor-rated creative job performance, while again showing synergy diversity climate to be an important boundary condition. In sum, we find that synergy diversity climate, as opposed to fairness and discrimination diversity climate, interacts with employee seniority by facilitating greater creative process engagement for newcomers subsequently impacting creative job performance. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for how the individual-level creative job performance effects may represent a microfoundation to creative team dynamics that confer a sustainable competitive advantage.     

What determines creative association? Revealing two factors which separately influence the creative process when solving the Remote Associates Test

The Remote Associates Test is a well‐established measure, frequently used to assess individuals’ creative abilities, as a function of the ability to elicit remote associates. The nature of the involved associative processes is still poorly understood. This hampers a deeper understanding of the creative process, rendering it difficult to determine what factors are controlled for, when the RAT is employed. We report an experiment that sheds further light on the nature of the associative process by manipulating (a) the frequency with which a pair of items are associated as associative strength, and (b) the probability of reaching the answer given the strength and the spread. Experimental results indicate a clear and surprisingly separate influence of frequency and probability on accuracy and response times. Frequency and probability both are thus factors that need to be included in the modeling process and controlled for when using the RAT to assess creativity.     

Measuring creative thinking: An activity‐based approach

The primary objective of this exploratory study was to test activity‐based behavioral measures of creative thinking with a sample of Hong Kong fifth‐grade school children, and also to determine the concurrent validity between activity‐based measures of creative thinking and standard divergent thinking tests. Altogether five creative thinking abilities were measured using the behavioral techniques and the children's scores for fluency, flexibility, and originality were compared with those from the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). The construct‐related validity among all the different abilities on the behavioral measures was also calculated. Contrary to previous assertions about the lack of creativity among Chinese populations, the Hong Kong children demonstrated their ability to use a number of creative thinking features in order to solve problems. No construct validity was found between the different measures of creativity except between originality and fluency. Possible reasons for this are reviewed. The TTCT and the behavioral techniques were found to have some concurrent validity in relationto fluency and originality on the Verbal Tests. There was no correlation for flexibility. The advantages of using activity‐based measurements of creative behavior are discussed.     

To sleep, perchance to gain creative insight?

The development of mathematical insight, the knack for discovering novel solutions to mathematical problems, might be one of the most erudite forms of learning that we can hope to achieve. However, Wagner and his colleague now report that a night of sleep after being exposed to a class of mathematical problems more than doubles the likelihood of discovering just such a novel solution.     

A complementary—Empowering model of ministerial leadership

Conclusion In conclusion, we suggest that both contemporary leadership effectiveness theory and a Biblical view of leadership empowering point to what we have called a complementary-empowering model of ministerial leadership. The varying levels of maturity to be found in any congregation require an adaptable leadership style that addresses each member of the congregation at his/her level of maturity and empowers that person for ministry and leadership in the church and community. The skills needed to lead persons at each of the maturity levels are not always given to every minister, thus the complementarity of the Body of Christ provides a variety of gifted leaders who together can empower believers for lives of service to the Body and ministry in the community.     

I want to be creative,but … preference for creativity,perceived clear outcome goals,work enjoyment,and creative performance

In today’s quickly changing work environment, many individuals want to be creative at their workplace, but only some of them succeed at manifesting these tendencies. In three studies, using both field and experimental data, we focused on transforming individuals’ preference for creativity, defined as an inclination for liking and wanting to be creative, into actual creativity. We first conducted a pilot Study 1 to establish discriminant validity to related constructs and provided initial evidence on predictive and incremental validity of the preference-for-creativity scale. Next, we performed a field Study 2, where we found that transforming preferences for creativity into supervisor-rated creativity is contingent upon employees’ perceptions of clear outcome goals. Clear outcome goals fostered individuals’ preference for creativity to result in higher levels of supervisor-rated creative behaviour—a finding that was replicated in an experimental Study 3. Furthermore, we explored whether work enjoyment mediated the moderated relationship between preference for creativity and creative outcomes. The results supported our mediated moderation model, whereby the manipulation of clear goals led to higher work enjoyment, influencing individuals’ preference for creativity to result in higher ratings of their creative outcomes.     

Constitutional causes for technological leadership: Why Europe?

In a paper circulated toward the end of 1997 under the title “Why Europe?,” Gordon Tullock posed a simple question and provided a tentative, yet provocative answer. The question is why the technological takeoff took place in Europe when well into the eighteenth century other areas of the world, notably China, looked much better poised for technological and scholarly leadership than Europe. His tentative answer turns on the constitutional composition of the landscape of political entities in Europe. This essay provides further underpinnings to Gordon Tullock’s preliminary answer.     

How to get radical creative ideas into a leader’s mind? Leader’s achievement goals and subordinates’ voice of creative ideas

In the present research we investigated when and why leaders tend to oppose or adopt radical creative ideas voiced by their subordinates. In a field study (Study 1, N = 127) we showed that leaders’ performance goals were positively related to their tendency to oppose radical creative ideas, whereas leaders’ mastery goals were positively related to their tendency to adopt them. We replicated these findings in an experimental study (Study 2, N = 90), in which we showed that performance goal leaders were more likely to oppose radical creative ideas voiced by their subordinates than mastery goal leaders, whereas mastery goal leaders were more likely to adopt those ideas than performance goal leaders. In Study 2, we further showed that the effects of leaders’ achievement goals on their oppose and adopt responses were mediated by the leaders’ interest in exploration. Finally, in Study 3 (N = 91), we experimentally demonstrated that oppose and adopt responses of performance goal leaders, rather than mastery goal leaders, were sensitive to the behavioural mode by which subordinates voiced their radical creative ideas. That is, performance goal leaders were less likely to oppose and more likely to adopt radical creative ideas when subordinates voiced them in a considerate mode rather than an aggressive mode.     

Does diversity in team members’ agreeableness benefit creative teams?

Although deep-level diversity among team members are often discussed as important catalysts of team creativity, little is currently understood about the impact of diversity in team members’ personality on team creativity and team satisfaction. We propose that diversity in team members’ agreeableness would reduce the effectiveness of creative teams through its impact on team conflict experienced. To test our hypotheses, we recruited 93 student teams to participate in a laboratory study where each member had their personality traits assessed before engaging in a team creativity task. We found that diversity in team members’ agreeableness was positively associated with team task conflict experienced which, in turn, was negatively associated with team creativity. Additionally, we found that diversity in team members’ agreeableness was positively associated with team relationship conflict, which, in turn, was negatively associated with team satisfaction. Implications and future directions are discussed.     

Creativity on tap? Effects of alcohol intoxication on creative cognition

Anecdotal reports link alcohol intoxication to creativity, while cognitive research highlights the crucial role of cognitive control for creative thought. This study examined the effects of mild alcohol intoxication on creative cognition in a placebo-controlled design. Participants completed executive and creative cognition tasks before and after consuming either alcoholic beer (BAC of 0.03) or non-alcoholic beer (placebo). Alcohol impaired executive control, but improved performance in the Remote Associates Test, and did not affect divergent thinking ability. The findings indicate that certain aspects of creative cognition benefit from mild attenuations of cognitive control, and contribute to the growing evidence that higher cognitive control is not always associated with better cognitive performance.     

Ana?s Nin and the developmental use of the creative process.

Ana?s Nin had the capacity to work through the wound of self-injury through the combination of poetic and analytic exploration demonstrated in her writing. She recreated her father, and confronted the fallacies of her idealization, as well as the suppressed anger that kept her enslaved in wishes for his mirroring admiration. There was no escape from injury for Nin. After the father's departure, she scrutinized herself for flaws, trying to discover a reason for her father's betrayal. Yet, the humiliation was modified by some knowledge of the narcissistic bind that she was in, and by some evidence that her father was unworthy of the kind of worship that she clung to from childhood. Nin transcends retaliation. Her fictional abandonment of her father does not come from vindictiveness. Rather, it comes through growing insight into herself and into her own needs. There is a letting-go of past fantasies of idealization, and a mourning process that is based on both awareness and acceptance of the disappointments in these idealized fantasies. Separation and loss stem from surrendering the fusion with the idealized object and its counterpart grandiose self, a grandiose self seen here as a false self that exists through resonating with image projections and their reflections.     

Meta-analytic studies of leadership: Added insights or added paradoxes?

This research examines the extent to which meta-analysis of leadership research fulfills its promise to bring order into a body of literature characterized by inconsistent, equivocal findings. Manual and computer searches yielded 14 meta-analyses which clustered around the following leadership topics: (1) theories of leadership (n=7); (2) leadership in small groups (n=2); and gender differences in leadership (n=5). In all three categories, the results of the meta-analyses were as inconsistent as those of primary research. Differences in the types of meta-analystic techniques used, differences in judgment calls including decisions defining the research domain, establishing criteria for inclusion of studies, coding characteristics and selection of potential moderators are, at least in part, responsible for the differences observed. In addition, areas of leadership research which have produced sizable bodies of empirical studies such as the effects of power on leadership outcomes, leader effectiveness as well as the effects of leadership competencies and leadership contexts on leader-follower relations have not been subjected to statistical aggregation and summarization of results across studies. Recommendations for improving the quality of meta-analytic research on leadership are offered.     

Burnout in the information technology sector: Does leadership matter?

The aim of the study was to examine subordinates' level of burnout in relation to how they perceive the leadership style of their direct superior. Subordinates (n = 289) in an Information Technology firm completed Maslach Burnout Inventory – General Survey, and rated their superior on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. High subordinate burnout was defined as high exhaustion, high cynicism, and low professional efficacy. A structural equation model revealed that transformational leadership was significantly related to cynicism and professional efficacy, while passive-avoidance was significantly related to exhaustion and cynicism. Transactional leadership was not linked to burnout. Neuroticism in subordinates was directly related to all burnout components. The link between passive-avoidant leadership and burnout's key component exhaustion indicates perception of negative leadership behaviours is more important for burnout than perception of positive leadership styles.