Prosocial Motivation as a Double-Edged Sword on Creativity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current research develops the theoretical account of how prosocial motivation relates to creativity and how prosocial impact of task affects this relationship. I theorize that prosocial motivation has conflicting influences on employee creativity such that it bolsters the usefulness but hinders the novelty dimension of creativity. In an effort to search for a way of increasing prosocial employees’ creativity, I investigate the roles of prosocial impact of task. Specifically, I hypothesize that prosocial employees are likely to show higher levels of creativity when they work on tasks that can benefit others. This is because such tasks meet the needs of prosocial employees and thus increase their intrinsic motivation on the tasks, which then complements the weakness of prosocial employees (i.e., novelty). A mix of three laboratory and quasi-field experiments supported the hypotheses. Study 1 (a laboratory experiment) showed that prosocial motivation increases usefulness while decreasing novelty of ideas. Study 2 (a quasi-field experiment) found that prosocial impact of task enables prosocial individuals to be creative in idea generation by increasing not only novelty but also usefulness. Study 3 (a quasi-field experiment) showed that intrinsic motivation mediates the interactive effects that prosocial motivation and prosocial impact of task have on creativity. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".