Andy’s Quick Hits (67): Grumpy and Creative in Business? Yes, Emotional Diversity is more Effective.

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Our intuition would probably say that if you want a business team to work well, and be creative, you would want the team to be positive and happy. In fact there’s a whole bunch of advisors and consultants promoting positivity in the workplace (not that that’s all bad, obviously).

But that’s not necessarily true. Firstly I have written about depressive realists and depressive creatives in other places. Think of the creative depressive artist. Secondly a piece of research from Rice University, hot off the presses, has looked at affective (emotional) diversity in creative teams in business and come up with some surprising results, maybe.

Rice U. study: Use your team's emotions to boost creativity

What they note (and is known in the academic literature) is that different emotions are related to different abilities. So negative thinker are critical and persistent thinkers who can identify problems that need solutions and future problems that might hinder innovation, whereas positive thinkers are broad flexible thinkers that can find unusual and creative…