Intrinsic and Prosocial Motivations, Perspective Taking, and Creativity

By Adam M. Grant, James W. Berry. Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, 2011

1,024 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although many scholars believe that intrinsic motivation fuels creativity, research has returned equivocal results. Drawing on motivated information processing theory, we propose that the relationship between intrinsic motivation and creativity is enhanced by other-focused psychological processes. Perspective taking, as generated by prosocial motivation, encourages employees to develop ideas that are useful as well as novel. In three studies, using both field and lab data, we found that prosocial motivation strengthened the association between intrinsic motivation and independent creativity ratings. In our second and third studies, perspective taking mediated this moderating effect. We discuss theoretical implications for creativity and motivation.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/75de8071def17b40bf412bf2612f282e873526fc

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Citations in the corpus

Serving followers and family? A trickle-down model of how servant leadership shapes employee work performance (2019, methodology): “Supervisors rated their own levels of family motivation using a five-item scale by Menges et al. (2017; α = .89). intrinsic and extrinsic motivation using single items (Grant & Berry, 2011), supervisor and employee gender (coded 0 = male, 1 = female), age, number of children, and company membership.”
Speaking Up When Water Is Murky: An Uncertainty-Based Model Linking Perceived Organizational Politics to Employee Voice (2018, background): “…regarding potential benefits brought by promotive voice is expected to generate a low sense of self-determination at work (Gagné & Deci, 2005; Grant & Berry, 2011; Rosen, Harris, & Kacmar, 2011), which in turn may cause employees to withdraw from proactive forms of work behavior (Colquitt,…”
The influence of prosocial motivation and civility on work engagement:The mediating role of thriving at work (2018, background): “The greater employees are involved in prosocial activities, the higher their work engagement is, as recommended by Eldor (2016), Grant and Berry (2011), and Shaufeli (2012).”
Entrepreneurial Imaginativeness in New Venture Ideation (2018, background): “Similarly, Grant and Berry (2011) found that taking the perspective of others encouraged employees to engage in creative behavior in the field andparticipants to generate more novel and useful ideas in the lab.”
Innovation and profit motivations for social entrepreneurship: A fuzzy-set analysis (2019, background): “2 We follow Grant and Berry (2011), Branzei, Parker, Moroz, and Gamble (2018) and others to refer to “prosocial attitude” as a higher-level construct encompassing all the underlying cognitions, such as empathy (e.g. Bacq & Alt, 2018), or compassion (e.g. Miller et al., 2012), since our purpose is…”
Supervisor Prosocial Motivation, Employee Thriving, and Helping Behavior: A Trickle-Down Model of Psychological Safety (2018, background): “Our findings add to recent research that indicates that those that are more prosocially motivated are better able to understand others’ perspectives and values, and adapt behaviors that are appropriate given the context (De Dreu et al., 2000; Grant & Berry, 2011).”
Public Service Motivation, Prosocial Motivation and Altruism: Towards Disentanglement and Conceptual Clarity (2019, background): “It is argued that prosocially motivated individuals are focused on the future – they are concerned with achieving a purposeful outcome through their work (Grant & Berry, 2011).”
A Sociocultural Theory of Creativity: Bridging the Social, the Material, and the Psychological (2020, background): “There is accumulating empirical evidence that perspective taking contributes to creativity (e.g., Grant & Berry, 2011; Hawlina et al., 2019; Wang et al., 2017).”
The influence of corporate social responsibility on investment efficiency and innovation (2019, positive): “…(i.e., CSR performance) increases cognitive flexibility, willingness to take risks, and an openness to complexity, which in turn creates an environment where innovative ideas and solution sets to complex problems can flourish (De Dreu 2006; Porter and Kramer 2006, 2011; Grant and Berry 2011).”