Emotional Reactions to Idea Evaluation: Creative Perseverance and Evaluating Others

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ABSTRACT Innovation is driven by the creativity of individuals. This creative process involves both generative and evaluative steps, but we know far less about the evaluative process than we do about the generative, despite idea evaluation being essential to the successful implementation of innovations. Receiving evaluations is an event known to induce emotional reactions, however, it is unclear how these reactions may impact the creative process beyond the evaluation. To address this, we utilized affective events theory to examine the relationships between idea evaluation as an affective event, the emotional reactions (positive and negative emotions), and two resulting affect-driven behaviors – perseverance and evaluating the ideas of others. Our results suggest that the valence of the idea evaluation (positive, neutral, or negative) is related to positive and negative emotional reactions. This relationship is moderated by self-evaluations of one’s own creativity, and the emotional reaction mediates the relationship between evaluations and whether individuals persevere on the creative task as well as whether they retaliate in their evaluations of others’ ideas.