When it comes to what customers want in products, creativity isn't the icing on the cake, says Professor Jennifer Mueller. It is the cake. But a focus on feasibility and profits may prevent managers from even recognizing ideas that could be hits.

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.