An Empirical Study On Influencing Mechanism Of Performance Expectancy On Creativity For Ph.D Students

There will be more creativity competitions between different countries with the world economy development. Technological creativity will be the most important task for our country joining in the international competition in the future. While the creative talent is the base of creativity, so many foreign researches are focused on the influencing factors of personally creativity. This study is from the perspective of social psychology, based on the motivation theory, exploring the influencing mechanism of Performance Expectancy on the creativity and creative behaviors for the Ph.D students.This study includes three sub-studies. Study I: According to the definition of performance expectancy, and through exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, we identify the two factors model of performance expectancy for Ph.D students, including the development of performance expectancy and reward performance expectancy.Study II: We make an exploratory study on the influence of the development performance expectancy and reward performance expectancy on the creative behavior, testing the mediation of internal motivation. We collect 390 Ph.D students of Huazhong University of Science to make a questionnaire survey. Results show that the performance expectancies including the development of performance expectancy and reward performance expectancy have positive effects on the intrinsic motivation and also there is a strong positive relationship between the intrinsic motivation and creative behavior.StudyⅢ: We make another exploratory study on the influence of the performance expectancy on the objective creative results and creative behavior, testing the mediating effect of performance pressure. The results show that there is a strong positive effect between the performance expectancy and the performance pressure, and a negative effect between the performance pressure and the objective creative results.This study explores the influencing mechanism of Performance Expectancy on the creativity and creative behaviors for the Ph.D students through two-paths including performance pressure and internal motivation. The results of our study have important practical significance for the management of creativity for the universities in China. In order to improve the PhD students'creative motivation, the universities should not only pay attention to the pay rewards, but also put more attention on the development-related rewards, such as training and promotion.