Coming up with fresh ideas for new or existing products, services and processes is widely recognized as the key to enduring economic advantage, and as a result, employee creativity has taken center stage in discussions of innovation. But how can creativity be actively fostered and sustained in the workplace? Paying attention to employee emotions is critical, say the authors. Organizations are emotion-laden environments, and while research has begun to validate affective (i.e. emotional) influences on a number of work outcomes (including task quality, productivity and efficiency), little is known about how naturally-occurring affective experiences in the flow of our daily work lives relate to creative thinking on the job. The authors show that the emotion-creativity system is a cycle, whereby influences at any point can begin a dynamic pattern of increasing or decreasing positive affect and creativity.

Managers often take projects well past the point at which they should drop them. To see if they have come to this point, managers must look closely at themselves and recognize which of the influences they may be under. Some influences are psychological--they've been rewarded in the past for sticking to their guns, so why shouldn't the same thing happen this time? Some are social--no one likes a loser. And some are structural--important members of the organization are publicly committed to the project. The rest of the job belongs to top management. Its course is to rethink what behavior it rewards and how it staffs projects and to ensure that its information systems report the real odds.