Different Forms of Creativity? Regulatory Focus & Cognitive Processes on Novelty and Usefulness

Abstract

This paper examines how individual differences in regulatory focus (promotion and prevention focus and their combination) influence individuals to generate creative solutions that vary in their degree of novelty and usefulness. In an experimental design using a product development task (n = 227), we disentangled the effect of individual regulatory focus on the cognitive processes and creativity facets. Individuals with a high promotion focus produced creative prototypes that were more novel. Flexibility was a partial mediator of this relationship with a positive effect on novelty, while fluency had a negative mediating effect. Although prevention focus did not have an effect on either novelty or usefulness, it had a conditional effect on the relationship between promotion focus and novelty. The positive effect of promotion focus became insignificant for both low and high levels of prevention focus. Overall, our findings suggest that the impact of promotion focus on creativity is mainly on the novelty side of creativity, while prevention focus in itself has no relationship with either creativity facet. We discuss implications of the findings for future research on creativity in workplace settings.