Call for Papers

The last few decades have seen an exponential increase of research on creativity and creative work (Harrison et al., 2022; Harvey & Berry, 2023). Within this work, the notion of creative endurance has emerged as a fundamental yet underexplored and underspecified facet of creative pursuits. “Creative endurance” is in fact used to define two different constructs – one referring to creators’ characteristics, and the other referring to properties of a specific idea or product.
 
For creators, endurance is a synonym for motivation, self-efficacy, and persistence which are foundational to one’s ability to perform creative work and to successfully push an idea from generation to implementation (Amabile & Pratt, 2016; De Dreu et al., 2012; Liu et al., 2016). Endurance is fundamental to overcome all the obstacles that can stand in the way of the creative process and the idea journey: interruptions (Mochi & Madjar, 2018), tedious tasks (Bruns & Long Lingo, 2024), rejection (Rouse, 2020), and the failure and dead ends that permeate the idea journey and creative work more broadly (Amabile, 1996; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017). Endurance is particularly needed for freelance workers, whose ideas can take many years to get implemented. For example, Quentin Tarantino needed three years to turn the initial concept of Pulp Fiction into a script; and Thomas Edison had to experiment on over 1,600 filament materials before finally being able to design the electric light bulb (Lucas & Nordgren, 2015).
 
Yet, creators tend to underestimate its importance (Lucas & Nordgren, 2015, 2020) compared to other skills. This underestimation is reflected in the lack of proper accounts, both anecdotally and empirically, of how individuals develop this endurance – how they develop the tough skin, motivation, and drive to continue to persevere even in the face of adversity and day-to-day obstacles. Accounting for the sources of endurance requires taking a multilevel and cross-temporal approach, examining the multiple individual, social, and cultural factors that can shape its emergence, as well as the variety of contingencies that could play a role. Having strict, tough parents, for example, could be a source of motivation and drive for some, thus fostering endurance, but make others particularly sensitive to negative feedback and failure, thus hampering endurance.
 
At the idea or product level, endurance represents an idea’s ability to survive the test of time. While some ideas last for long periods of time, others fade away quickly (Simonton, 1980, 1999). Similarly, while some ideas are immediately hailed and recognized as creative, other ideas take time before they are recognized or considered to be creative (Cattani et al., 2017; Sgourev, 2013; Wijnberg & Gemser, 2000). Research has only started to scratch the surface of what makes a creative idea or product more or less likely to endure the test of time. The ability to be considered a creative product over time might be due to some intrinsic characteristics of the product, but it is likely also the byproduct of the social systems that pass judgment on the product itself, consecrating it as creative. For example, the rise of Impressionism was made possible by a significant change in the selection system and criteria applied to assess what was “creative” (Wijnberg & Gemser, 2000). The definition itself of creativity can vary over time (Simonton, 1980), which means that ideas whose creative appeal endure have to be “robust” for these shifts in audiences’ conceptualizations and tastes.
 
Papers submitted to this sub-theme may include, but are not restricted to, the following questions:

• Why do some creators persist and other give up in the face of creative difficulties?

• What are the individual, social, and cultural processes through which individuals develop creative endurance?

• Can endurance be learned and become an individual and/or an organizational competence or does it come up inexplicably from time to time?

• How can an organization structure the work environment to enable both the development and maintenance of individual creative endurance?

• What makes an idea pass the test of time while others fall into oblivion?

• How do some ideas “survive” an initial lack of recognition to then become creative classics?

 
More broadly, this sub-theme aims to contribute to the ever-growing creativity domain, and it welcomes all scholars that are interested in presenting cutting-edge research that can lead to building a more complete understanding of creative endurance both from the creator and product perspective. Contributors to this sub-theme are encouraged to elaborate and test new theories of how creators endure in pursuing their creative projects, and how creative ideas and products endure the test of time or fade away into obscurity. Rigorous conceptual and empirical research with relevance to organizational settings is called for, and we encourage diverse, novel, and juxtaposed theoretical perspectives and methods.
 

References

• Amabile, T.M. (1998): “How to Kill Creativity.” Harvard Business Review, 76 (5), 76–87.

• Bruns, H.C., & Long Lingo, E. (2024): “Tedious Work: Developing Novel Outcomes with Digitization in the Arts and Sciences.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 69 (1), 39–79.
• Deichmann, D., & Baer, M. (2022): “A recipe for success? Sustaining creativity among first-time creative producers.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 108 (1), 100–113.
• De Dreu, C.K., Nijstad, B.A., Baas, M., Wolsink, I., & Roskes, M. (2012): “Working memory benefits creative insight, musical improvisation, and original ideation through maintained task-focused attention.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38 (5), 656–669.
• Harrison, S.H., Rouse, E.D., Fisher, C.M., & Amabile, T.M. (2022): “The turn toward creative work.” Academy of Management Collections, 1 (1), 1–15.
• Harvey, S., & Berry, J.W. (2023): “Toward a meta-theory of creativity forms: How novelty and usefulness shape creativity.” Academy of Management Review, 48 (3), 504–529.
• Liu, D., Jiang, K., Shalley, C.E., Keem, S., & Zhou, J. (2016): “Motivational mechanisms of employee creativity: A meta-analytic examination and theoretical extension of the creativity literature.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 137, 236–263.
• Lucas, B.J., & Nordgren, L.F. (2015): “People underestimate the value of persistence for creative performance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109 (2), 232.
• Lucas, B.J., & Nordgren, L.F. (2020): “The creative cliff illusion.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (33), 19830–19836.
• Mochi, F., & Madjar, N. (2018): “Interruptions and multitasking: Advantages and disadvantages for creativity at work.” In: R. Reiter-Palmon, V.L. Kennel & J.C. Kaufman (eds.): Individual Creativity in the Workplace. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 103–127.
• Perry-Smith, J.E., & Mannucci, P.V. (2017): “From creativity to innovation: The social network drivers of the four phases of the idea journey.” Academy of Management Review, 42 (1), 53–79.
• Sgourev, S.V. (2013): “How Paris gave rise to Cubism (and Picasso): Ambiguity and fragmentation in radical innovation.” Organization Science, 24 (6), 1601–1617.
• Simonton, D.K. (1980): “Thematic fame, melodic originality, and musical zeitgeist: A biographical and transhistorical content analysis.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38 (6), 972.
• Simonton, D K. (1998): “Fickle fashion versus immortal fame: Transhistorical assessments of creative products in the opera house.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75 (1), 198.
• Wijnberg, N.M., & Gemser, G. (2000): “Adding value to innovation: Impressionism and the transformation of the selection system in visual arts.” Organization Science, 11 (3), 323–329.
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