Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- All Subjects: Divergent thinking
- Creators: Dongell, Christine
- Creators: Glenberg, Arthur
Description
The work environment can have a measurable impact on the extent to which a person generates new and potentially useful ideas. The present study tested a comprehensive model of personality and employee creativity, moderated by the work environment. I proposed moderation effects that physical and social-organizational elements in the work environment as well as workplace flexibility may have on employee creativity. Participants (N = 81) were invited to take an online survey examining personality traits, the work environment, and creativity. Results showed that openness to experience was a significant predictor of employee creativity. Findings also suggested that the relationship between personality and employee creativity is altered by social-organizational elements in the work environment. Specifically, employees with high levels of openness displayed more divergent thinking and creative behavior in the office work environment when levels of realized social-organizational elements were high. Additionally, employees with high levels of extraversion engaged in less creative behaviors in the home work environment when levels of realized social-organizational elements were very low. The relationship between personality and employee creativity is also altered by the perceived importance of social-organizational elements in the workplace in general. Findings revealed that employees with high levels of openness displayed more creative behavior and ideational behavior when the perceived importance of social-organizational elements in the workplace in general was high. Conversely, findings revealed that employees with high levels of extraversion displayed less creative behavior and ideational behavior when the perceived importance of social-organizational elements in the workplace in general was low. Given the lack of research exploring moderating effects of the work environment on creativity, further research is recommended to investigate the impact of both physical and social-organizational elements and workplace flexibility on employee creativity, the ability to generate novel and potentially useful ideas.
ContributorsDongell, Christine (Author) / Trinh, Mai P. (Thesis advisor) / McCain, Kate (Committee member) / Stauffer, Sandra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In this study, the oppositional processes theory was proposed to suggest that reliance on semantic and episodic memory systems hinder originality during idea generation for divergent thinking tasks that are generally used to assess creative potential. In order to investigate the proposed oppositional processes theory, three experiments that manipulated the memory accessibility in participants during the alternative uses tasks were conducted. Experiment 1 directly instructed participants to either generate usages based on memory or not from memory; Experiment 2 provided participants with object cues that were either very common or very rare in daily life (i.e., bottle vs. canteen); Experiment 3 replicated the same manipulation from Experiment 2 with much longer generation time (10 minutes in Experiment 2 vs. 30 minutes in Experiment 3). The oppositional processes theory predicted that participants who had less access to direct and unaltered usages (i.e., told to not use memory, were given rare cues, or were outputting items later in the generation period) during the task would be more creative. Results generally supported the predictions in Experiments 1 and 2 where participants from conditions which limited their access to memory generated more novel usages that were considered more creative by independent coders. Such effects were less prominent in Experiment 3 with extended generation time but the trends remained the same.
ContributorsXu, Dongchen (Author) / Brewer, Gene (Thesis advisor) / Glenberg, Arthur (Committee member) / Homa, Donald (Committee member) / Goldinger, Stephen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017