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The key to the relationship between creativity and dishonesty

A new study by Lynne Vincent and Maryam Kouchaki demonstrates that believing that you are a creative person can create feelings of entitlement when you think that creativity is rare and valuable. That feeling of entitlement can be costly for you and your organization as it can cause you to be dishonest.

Many organizations now are recognizing the importance of creativity and are attempting to encourage their employees to be creative. However, there is a cost to that creativity when creativity is seen as a rare and unique attribute (属性). The findings in this study are based on several laboratory experiments, in addition to a study of employees and supervisor pairs.

While creativity is in most cases valued, such as other positive attributes, including practicality or intelligence, it may be over-valued compared to those other positive attributes because creativity is by definition (本质上) rare. That sense of rarity then creates a sense of entitlement. People see their creative efforts as special and valuable and feel that they are worthy of extra rewards for their creative efforts. That entitlement can cause them to steal in order to get the rewards.

However, it is naive (天真的) to assume that employees in companies that have developed a strong identity as creative, such as Apple, Google, and IDEO, would be necessarily more dishonest due to their creativity.

“The key to the relationship between creativity and dishonesty is the sense of rarity,” said Vincent. “When individuals identified themselves as creative and believed that creativity was rare, entitlement appeared. However, if individuals believed that creativity was common, that sense of entitlement was reduced.”

When people in the laboratory experiments believed that their creativity was rare compared to common, they were more likely to lie for money. However, when people believed that being practical was rare compared to common, the increased sense of psychological entitlement and dishonesty did not occur. The effect was seen in organizations too. 

Although creativity is important in the business world, the dark side of creativity has only partly studied. However, as creativity is becoming more important for organizations, it is important for organizations to understand how to encourage creativity. Encouraging creativity in organizations is not as simple as telling employees to be creative. Defining what it means to be creative and what creativity means in that context is important. When people define creativity in terms of being rare and valuable, seeing yourself as a creative person can cause entitlement and dishonesty. However, if organizations define creativity as a common and everyday behavior or an attribute that many people can have, organizations may be able to encourage employee creativity without encouraging employee dishonesty.

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Nobody is allowed to eat pizza near Christopher Merrett－just the smell of it can be deadly for the two-year-old, who has a severe allergy (过敏反应) to dairy products (奶制品).

    Mrs. Merrett said she first realized something was wrong with her son when she stopped feeding him with her milk at six months old and moved onto cows’ milk.

She said her son spent three weeks in hospital after sitting in a supermarket trolley (手推车) which had tiny traces of milk in it. She said, “It looked clean. We put him there and within minutes his feet and hands had gone blue and we knew there was something dreadfully wrong. We realized then he must have put his fingers in his mouth after touching the trolley and it must have previously had some sort of milk product on it.”

Mrs. Merrett added, “We cannot have pizza when he is in the house. I remember going to Pizza Hut for my daughter’s birthday and Christopher began to cough as soon as we got there.”

Mrs. Merrett, who took time off her job to care for her son, and her husband Michael, 47, have spent hours reading ingredients labels (成分标签) and carrying out hard research on the Internet, trying to find suitable food that their son can eat.

Because Christopher’s allergies are so severe that the couple has prepared an entire cupboard for his food. He also has his own shelf in the fridge and oven.

    Little Christopher was taken out of nursery school when he was given cheese by accident and he ended up in hospital. His mother now worries about what could happen when he eventually goes to school.

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