Affect and creativity in organizations: Taking stock and moving forward

Creativity is a complex endeavor. It involves identifying a problem, generating novel and useful ideas, selecting and trying out the most promising ones, and finally working on their implementation to solve the problem (Amabile, 1988). These processes can be performed by individuals working alone, labeled individual-level creativity, or by a group of individuals working together, so, creativity at the group or team level. Creative activity demands a series of psychological processes that make it possible in practice (George, 2007). Affective processes, namely, the experience of emotions and moods characterized by differences in pleasure and energy (Russell, 2003; Watson, 2000), have for some time been recognized as relevant for creativity. Research has shown that affect can be a potent precursor of working with new ideas, such that positive and negative feelings have the potential to foster creative outcomes (Madrid & Patterson, 2018; Zhou & Hoever, 2014). Affect should be related to creativity because affect denotes a series of psychological functions with directive properties over cognition and behavior to ensure human adaptation (Forgas, 1995), especially when the domain of performance is complex, such as the case of creativity.