Good or Bad for Ambivalent Emotion on Creativity? A Moderated Mediation Model

Abstract

Ambivalent situations trigger ambivalent emotions, such as the simultaneous experience of happiness and sadness, which is a pervasive phenomenon in organizations, such as a CEO feels optismic for launching a new project but at same time feels worried because the new project needs invest too much money, which may hurt the old projects. Do ambivalent emotions facilitate or hinder creativity? Informational theories of emotion (Forgas, 2000) deems ambivalent emotions stimulate more information which facilitates creativity. Another perspective thinks ambivalence is a stressful situation that hinders creativity, which demands more psychological resources to identify and solve problems in a new way. By integrating conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), theory about emotion regulation strategy (Koole, 2009) and bifurcation model of affect (Li, Ashkanasy, & Ahlstrom, 2010), we developed a moderated mediation model, where creative process engagement mediates the relationship between ambivalent emotions and creativity, where ambivalent emotion decreases the creative process engagement so that results in decreased creativity. And one dimension of a new construct of emotional stability (ES, emotional threshold) moderated the mediation effect of idea generation engagement such that the relationship is stronger when the emotional threshold is high. We also find that another dimension of the new ES (emotional recovery) is positively related to creativity. 316 employees from 50 work groups in China participated in the study.