Utility of Implicit Personality: Effects of Achievement Motivation and Evaluations on Creativity

Abstract

Implicit personality is a widely used concept in psychology but has yet to find little acceptance by management researchers. I describe implicit personality and its and relationship to existing personality concepts, and then provide a test of theory using an implicit measure of achievement motivation. I theoretically link achievement motivation to individual creative performance and describe how this relationship is moderated by expectations of different types of evaluations. This theory is then tested in a laboratory study with a measure of implicit achievement motivation. Results suggest achievement motivation, measured implicitly, is related to creative performance and is moderated by expectation of evaluation. This effect holds when controlling for other factors previously tested as predictors of creativity and an explicit measure of achievement motivation. Previous studies testing the link between achievement motivation and creativity had found no effect when using explicit measures. The major implications of this study are that achievement motivation is an important predictor of creative performance and that management researchers should give more credence to the utility of implicit personality.