Curiosity Makes Employees More Creative

For a long time,curiosity has been recognized as the source and driving force of innovation,but the relevant empirical evidences are surprisingly rare and the internal mechanism of curiosity acting on innovation is seldom discussed.At the same time,more and more scholars valued and stressed the impact of curiosity in the workplace on employee innovation and organizational innovation(Chang & Shih,2019 A,2019b),calling for the more experimental design or long-term longitudinal design to explore the causal relationship between curiosity and innovation activities(Celik et al.,2016;Schutte & Malouff,2019).Based on the Information Gap Theory,this study focuses on the individual's state curiosity and its dynamic influence--information seeking and inspiration arousing.The curiosity caused by information gap stimulates individuals to seek information reward,and the desire to explore initiates the pursuit of inspiration goal,which fueling the arousal of inspiration,and ultimately inspiration helps the development of innovative behavior.Using experimental and longitudinal designs,three series of studies examine the causal effect of state curiosity(epistemic curiosity)on innovative behavior,and verify the chain mediating effect of exploration drive and inspiration.Study 1 was an experimental study,using a single-factor design,to explore the casual effect of epistemic curiosity on individual innovation behavior.The results showed that when the curiosity of the participants was stimulated,their literary works had a higher level of creativity.Adopting the same experimental procedure as study 1,study 2 explored the serial mediating effects of exploration drive and inspiration on the relationship between epistemic curiosity and innovation behavior.The results displayed that curiosity positively influenced individual's innovation behavior through exploration drive and inspiration.In Study 3,the experience-sampling methodology(ESM)was applied to investigate the relationship between curiosity,drive,inspiration and innovation behavior in the two-level of within-and between-person.The results suggested that in the within level,daily epistemic curiosity positively predicted daily innovation behavior,daily exploration drive and daily inspiration;In the between level,the direct effect of cognitive curiosity on innovation behavior is not significant,but the serial indirect effect of exploration drive and inspiration on innovation behavior is significant.By the theory of information gap,this study confirmed the causal effect of state curiosity in promoting the development of innovation,revealed the chain action mechanism of exploration drive and inspiration,and provided empirical evidence for how does curiosity promote innovation.At the same time,the findings offer advice for enterprises to cultivate employees' innovation behavior by creating the curious situations,and further turn "micro innovation" to "big innovation".