A Research Program on Fear of Failure and Creativity

Abstract

Employee creativity is important for organizational innovation. However, creativity is risky and risks failure. Therefore, it is important to understand fear of failure (FOF hereafter) and how it influences creativity. This thesis includes a number of empirical studies examining FOF and creativity, arranged as follows:

Chapter 1 introduces FOF and creativity.

Chapter 2 provides an integrative review of FOF to date.

Chapter 3 presents two field studies investigating how FOF shaped by perfectionistic parents could lead to risk-averse behavior and decrease creativity and how a comparable workplace experience of perfectionistic supervisor expectations reinforces this link.

Chapter 4 investigates how hope of success (i.e., the opposite side of FOF), shaped by parents' work-family enrichment/conflict experience, could further influence children's financial success at work by using 17-year parent-child dyadic lifespan data matched from a 17-year national representative survey.

Chapter 5 shifts the attention back to creativity. The recent creativity literature shows that when people think darkly, they tend to be more creative; however, it is not truly beneficial for the social good. To reconcile such conflicting phenomena, I build on person-in-situation theory, arguing that altruism can facilitate both creativity and social goods when team standardization is low and team participation is high. A multisource time-lagged study from a Taiwanese government organization generally supported my hypotheses.

Finally, Chapter 6 integrates the key findings of the above empirical studies, offers conclusions, states the limitations of this thesis, and discusses future research directions.

In summary, this research offers a theoretical foundation for and practical suggestions to help individuals and authority figures such as supervisors and parents understand the potential downside (e.g., increased FOF) of imposing perfectionistic expectations on others and to understand what authority figures such as supervisors and parents can do to facilitate individuals' performance (e.g., creativity and financial success) at work.