Beyond Dishonesty: Expanding our Understanding of the Unexpected Negative Consequences of Creativity

Researchers have typically viewed creativity – the development of novel and potentially useful ideas (Amabile, 1996; Shalley, 1991) – as a beneficial activity, capable of promoting sustained organizational growth and competitive advantage (Amabile, 1998; Anderson, Potocnik, & Zhou, 2014). Over the past decade, however, the idea that employee creativity might also produce harmful consequences has attracted the attention of organizational scholars and practitioners. Much of this work has focused on the link between creativity and dishonest behavior (Beaussart, Andrews, & Kaufman, 2013; Gino & Wiltermuth, 2014). For example, prior research has found that thinking creatively provides individuals with a broader repertoire of reasons and justifications for their dishonest behavior (Gino & Ariely, 2012; Mai, Ellis, Welsh, 2015). More recently, Vincent and Kouchaki (2016) found that, when creativity is rare in the environment, creative employees are likely to feel psychologically entitled to engage in dishonesty. Despite these fruitful ?ndings and discussions, our understanding about the potential negative consequences of creativity is still relatively nascent. For example, although fewer in number, studies have also shown that the negative consequences of creativity may not be limited to dishonest behavior, but may have wide-ranging implications including those that cross work-life boundaries (Wagner & Harrison, 2016), and shape the perceptions and judgments of others (Mueller, Goncalo, & Kamdar, 2010). This suggests that we may have only scratched the surface in understanding the unintended consequences of creativity. We thus believe this area of research has important and interesting avenues still waiting to be explored, such as how creative employees manage others’ evaluations of their creativity, to what extent an employees’ creativity affects the way they are treated by their peers, the implications of creativity on individuals’ health and well-being, and the role leaders play in unintentionally encouraging creative employees’ harmful behavior. To this end, our symposium aims to deepen our understanding of the negative consequences of employee creativity by bringing together four papers that explore a broad-range of creativity’s unintended consequences. Furthermore, the studies included in this symposium will explore a diverse set of contexts and conditions that further explain why and when creativity leads to negative outcomes, thus providing new directions for future research on the dark-side of creativity. Creating Alone: When and Why Creative Performance Leads to Coworker Aggression. Presenter: Sejin Keem; Portland State U. Presenter: Amy Breidenthal; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Dong Liu; Georgia Institute of Technology Presenter: Chunyan Jiang; Nanjing U. Examining the Reputational and Knowledge Sharing Consequences of Employee Creativity. Presenter: Joel B. Carnevale; Syracuse U. Presenter: Lei Huang; Auburn U. Presenter: Lynne Catherine Vincent; Syracuse U. Presenter: Steven M Farmer; Wichita State U. Empowering Creative Performance or Creative Unethicality? The Role of Performance Pressure. Presenter: Ke Michael Mai; National U. of Singapore Presenter: David Welsh; Arizona State U. Presenter: Fuxi Wang; U. of International Business and Economics Presenter: Kaifeng Jiang; Ohio State U. Presenter: John Bush; Arizona State U. Fat, Drunk, and Lazy - How Engaging in Creative Tasks can Cause Unhealthy Choices. Presenter: Verena Krause; UCL School of Management Presenter: Lynne Catherine Vincent; Syracuse U. Presenter: Jack Anthony Goncalo; U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign