Bachelor thesis
"How does stress affect the relationship between
procrastination and self-rated creativity?"
BSc ECB
Supervisor: Wendelien van Eerde
Elizaveta Feoktistova, 1160376
This document is written by Student Elizaveta Feoktistova who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.
I declare that the text and the work presented in this document are original and that no sources other than those mentioned in the text and its references have been used in creating it.
The Faculty of Economics and Business is responsible solely for the supervision of completion of the work, not for the contents.
Abstract
Many examples of famous procrastinators can be found in history books. For
example, Frank Lloyd Wright, an architect who constructed one of his most famous houses in just two hours, Leonardo Da Vinci, who spent 16 years working on the Mona Lisa and
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart who wrote an introduction for the opera in the morning of the premiere. All of the above examples show a positive relationship between procrastination and creativity, but does it have the same result for everyone who practices it, or are those creative procrastinators are just an exception? Several empirical studies were done regarding this topic and the results of those papers are contradicting with each other. This thesis aims to find out if procrastination is related to self-rated creativity. Another proposes hypothesis is that there is a positive relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity, mediated by stress. The hypotheses were tested with a sample of 199 respondents using a survey format. Two hypotheses were supported by the model. The first one that there is a positive
relationship between procrastination and stress. Also, this paper proves that the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity is mediated by stress. Thus, there is no relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity.
Introduction
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a well-known genius musician, wrote the intro for the opera "Don Giovanni" the morning of the premiere, it was never rehearsed and the ink was still not dry on the music sheets, yet everyone loved it. This illustration is a perfect example of how stress due to procrastination may lead to creativity. He put everything off until the last minute and was stressing out because the premiere was supposed to be the next day. Him working under stress with minimum time until the deadline created an amazing overture with which "Don Giovanni" is still played in opera houses today. Even though this example does not represent most of the population, as not all of us are so talented, there is no doubt that a lot of us engage in procrastination the same way Mozart did.
Many people, especially college students engage in procrastination and start working on an assignment a few hours before it is due (Jarmolowicz, Hayashi & Pipkin, 2010). We have all been there, having work to do and a month to complete it or an important exam in a few weeks, yet, leaving preparations and doing the assigned work a few days or hours before submission or before the exam. Putting things off until the last minute is close to being
inevitable nowadays when you can get distracted by your phone, things you have to do, or events that you have to attend.
Taking into consideration all of the information presented above, this entails that there might be a relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity that is mediated by stress.
Theoretical background
-The description of the model (Figure 1)
Figure 1 The proposed model of stress mediating the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity
Procrastination - an inability to start the task beforehand and putting it away until the last minute (Brownlow & Reasinger, 2000). In other words, not starting the assigned work on time or beforehand and commence right before the deadline.
Creativity - placing components together to create something new (Maley, & Bolitho, 2015). Creativity can be tested in two ways: observed and self-rated, for this study the latter would be used. According to research self-observed creativity is more connected to creative personality, and is used as an inspiration for action that is why this variable would be utilized in this paper, but it has to be observed with discretion, mainly because this measure is very objective while the results of each person are subjective (Reiter-Palmon et a., 2012).
Stress - natural body response to extraneous survival-related needs (Stead, Shanahan, & Neufeld, 2010). It is usually a negative experience close to being anxious and nervous. Stress is something of common occurrence, either from studying, working, personal life or a combination of those.
-Procrastination and self-rated creativity
There are several papers concerning the topics of self-rated creativity, stress, and procrastination. Many papers demonstrate a positive relationship between procrastination and
creativity. One of the researches that show the relation is Subotnik et al.,(1999). They
interviewed 19 people who took part in "Westinghouse Science Talent Search". It was shown that half of the respondents whose work was connected to creativity used procrastination as a source to create something new. Contradictory view on this relationship can be seen in the work of Lim et al,. (2017), where creativity, state anxiety, and procrastination are all
presented. Their findings show that people who are engaging in procrastination are showing lower creativity results. In their results, it is claimed that stress mediates the relationship between procrastination and creativity and therefore leads to poor creativity. These findings are not in line with the findings of Subotnik et al., (1999) that were presented above. This particular paper suggests a positive relationship between those variables as it was seen in the example of Mozart's overture and was supported by the paper of Subotnik et al.,(1999). Therefore, the first hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 1: Procrastination will be positively related to self-rated creativity.
-Stress and self-rated creativity
In the paper of Byron & Khazanchi, (2011) it is shown that anxiety is negatively correlated with creativity. Anxiety is similar to stress, so if anxiety is negatively related to creativity it is raising the question if stress might be a mediating factor between
procrastination and creativity. On the other hand, Mozart's example shows a completely different picture as stress due to time pressure helped him write the masterpiece. Papers are confirming this side of the story as well, in the work of Chun Chu & Choi (2005) results show that stress leads to higher self-rated creativity as procrastinators work better under pressure. Taken into account Mozart's example and paper of Chun Chu & Choi (2005), this thesis suggests a positive relationship between stress and self-rated creativity. Thus, the second hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 2: Stress will be positively related to self-rated creativity.
-Procrastination and stress
Alongside with creativity, it has been confirmed that stress and procrastination are correlated in the work of Verešová., (2013). In her paper, there is a piece of evidence that stress among school teachers is positively related to procrastination. Therefore, the unadded part of the puzzle to be examined in this paper is how stress mediates the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity in a range of criterion variables. Given the above argument, the third hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 3: Procrastination will be positively related to stress.
The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the mediating effect of stress on the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. Translated to both study and business concept this paper aims to bring insights and a better understanding of whether companies and students should engage in procrastination for better results or not. Therefore, the fourth hypothesis is:
Hypothesis 4: Stress mediates the relationship between procrastination and self-rated
creativity.
Furthermore, this paper will benefit the knowledge on the subject of procrastination. Ultimately, this had led to the following research question:
"How does stress affect the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity?"
Methodology
-The research design
The design used for this study is a cross-sectional survey design. That means that the data was gathered at one point of time.. Survey design would suit best in this research as all concepts can be rated by individuals about themselves.
-Sample
The total amount of responses collected was 385, out of which 8 were deleted as "preview responses", then another 151 responses were deleted as well due to missing needed information and not being filled in. The final sample included 226 responses, out of which only 199 filled in their age, which resulted in the final sample number of 199. In the final data set, there were 65.5% females and 33.6% males. The mean age of the sample was "27.2" years with a standard deviation of "11,37". The most common education level of the people surveyed was "Bachelor's degree", 120 people out of 226, which is 53.1% of the whole sample. The second common was "High school degree or equivalent" with 43 out of 226 reporting this answer which is 19% of the sample. The third most common was "Master's degree (e.g. MA, MS, MEd)", 40 out of 226 reported this, resulting in 17.7% of the whole sample. Another 4%, to be exact 9 out of 226 responded that they have "Less than a high school diploma". And the least popular choice was "Doctorate (e.g. PhD, edD)", 5 people out of 226, that is 2.2% of the whole sample.
Participants were sampled using convenience sampling. The participants were sampled by using personal contacts of students of the University of Amsterdam. People completing the questionnaire were informed that their participation is both by choice and confidential. Each student had to distribute the survey to get responses. The data were collected within a period of one month. The data were analyzed using SPSS Statistics. The scales for measurement of variables chosen for this survey was a part of a bigger survey used for the course "Bachelor's thesis and thesis seminar Management in the digital age."
-Instruments
Three main variables were used: procrastination, stress, and self-rated creativity, all of those variables used a 5-item Likert scale to answer the questions.
Procrastination
Lay's (1986) general procrastination scale was used to test procrastination. It consists of 20 items, out of which only 1 ,7, 9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 19, and 20 were used to test
procrastination in this particular research. The number of items used was less than in the scale to allow shorter time spent per question in the questionnaire and also because the scale scored very high on reliability in previous researches, for example in the work of Sirois, Yang, and van Eerde (2019). Items set as an example of the scale are "I often find myself performing tasks that I had intended to do days before" and "I usually take care of all the tasks I have to do before I settle down and relax for the evening". Out of the nine items used, three had to be recoded. Participants rated the statements using a 5-item Likert scale ranging from "1=False" to "5=True for me". The reliability of the scale was high with Cronbach's alpha of 0.832. Stress
The perceived stress scale of Cohen, Kamarck, and Mermelstein (1983) was used. The scale asks participants to rate how often one situation or another occurred in the life of the respondent in the last month. It is a 14 items scale, but only 10 were used for this research as it was proven that the 10 item scale was superior to the 14 items one in the research of Lee (2012). Items that can be used as an example of such scale are "In the last month, how often have you been upset because of something that happened unexpectedly?" and "In the last month, how often have you found that you could not cope with all the things that you had to do?". Out of the 10 items used 4 items had to be recoded. The answer was in the form of a 5-item Likert scale ranging from "1=never" to "5=a lot". The scale showed high reliability of Cronbach's alpha of 0.802.
Self-rated creativity
Kaufman's domains of creativity scale (K-DOCS) from Kaufman (2012) was used. Self-rated creativity scale is a 50-item scale consisting of situations and spreads on 5 domains: everyday, scholarly, performance, science, and art (McKay, Karwowski, &
Kaufman, 2017). For this study, mostly everyday domain assessment was used for the goal of getting further information on what people of different ages and nationalities that are used in this sample to examine how they see themselves in comparison to others. Examples of this scale are: "Maintaining a good balance between my work and my personal life" and
"Planning a trip or event with friends that meet everyone’s needs". No items in the used scale had to be recoded. Answer form was ranging from "1=much less creative" to "5=much more creative". The reliability of the scale scored low but still reasonable reliability of 0.651. Control variables
To eliminate other possible effects on the hypothesis, control variables were used in this research. Gender, age and education were used as control variables. Education had 6 categories: 1="less than a high school diploma", 2="high school degree or equivalent", 3="bachelor's degree", 4="master's degree", 5="doctorate" and 6="other". Gender variable had 3 options: 1="male", 2="female" and 3="other". Control variable "education"was used as in the previous research, to be exact in the paper of Steel & Ferrari, (2013) the results show that as education level gets higher, people procrastinate less. These education categories was dealt with in accordance to frequencies of the outcomes. To see which categories are the most common in predicting the hypotheses.
Analytical plan
To test Hypotheses 1,2 and 3 linear regression was used to identify the relationships between the variables alongside control variables. To test Hypothesis 4 for mediation, the PROCESS macro of Hayes (2018) Model 4 with control variables was used.
Results
Table 1 Means, Standard deviations and Correlations Variables M SD 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. Gendera 1.67 .48 - 2. Age 27.15 11.37 -.024 - 3. Education 3.07 .986 -.078 .470** - 4. Procrastination 3.12 .709 .022 -.220** -.205** - 5. Stress 2.78 .511 .175** -.172* -.178** .265** - 6. Self-rated creativity 3.58 .413 .079 -.006 .102 -.072 -.288** -
Notes, N=199, a1=Male, 2=Female, b 1=less than a high school diploma, 2=high school
degree or equivalent, 3=bachelor's degree, 4=master's degree, 5=doctorate and 6=other ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed)
* correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed)
In Table 1 it can be seen that the chosen control variables do have a significant effect on both procrastination and stress. In the presented table the following conclusions could be drawn: procrastination and age are negatively correlated, procrastination and education are also negatively correlated. Stress is positively correlated with gender, negatively correlated with age and education and positively correlate with procrastination. Self-rated creativity is negatively significantly correlated with stress. No correlation between procrastination and self-rated creativity was found, which does not stay in line with the first hypothesis. Assumptions linear regression
To further look into the data and test the hypothesis the data should be in line with 5 assumptions of linear regression. Assumptions are normality, independence of observations, linear relationship, no influential outliers, homoscedasticity, and no substantial
Normality
To check for normality the data has to be presented in a histogram and represent a bell shape. Alongside the histogram, the P-P plot should also show observations that follow the normality (diagonal) line. If both of these conditions are satisfied the data is normally distributed. In all three relationships (procrastination and stress, stress, and self-rated creativity and procrastination and self-rated creativity) the data is presented in both the bell shape and along the normality line.
Independence of observations
Independence of observations means that each respondent is counted as one answer in the final data set, and there are no double answers in the data. As well as, the answers in the questionnaire of one person do not influence the answers of others. To test this the
Durbin-Watson test should be looked at. The outcome number of this test should lie in between two critical values 1.5<d<2.5. The Durbin-Watson test results of all three variables fall in between those numbers, which means we assume no linear auto-correlation in the used dataset.
A linear relationship between the outcome variable and the independent variable
To test for linearity between the OV and PV scatterplots had to be made to ensure a linear relationship. Scatterplot represents the interaction between two selected variables, one goes on the horizontal axis (X) and another goes onto the vertical axis (Y). Dots on the scatterplot have to resemble a straight line and each dot represents one answer from the sample concerning both the OV and the PV. The slope of the line shows how strong the relationship is as well as if it is positive or negative. In the scatterplot for procrastination and self-rated creativity a negative, weak association is shown but the dots represent the line, which means the linear relationship assumption is met.
No influential outliers
To make sure there are no influential outliers a few approaches could be chosen. The first one is a box plot for every variable except control ones. The box plot shows all of the cases that not fall within +/-1.5 IRQ from the 75th and 25th percentile respectively. While looking at the box plot for procrastination there were no outliers. When looking at the box plot for stress, case 43 is shown as an outlier. Another outlier can be seen in the box plot for self-rated procrastination, case number 90. To further check if those cases should be deleted as influential Cook's distance could be used. If the value of Cook's distance value for chosen
variables in all cases is less than 1, that means no influential outliers. When Cook's distance value is more than one it shows influential outliers that would influence the results of the analysis. In the used dataset no values of more than one were found, therefore no cases were deleted and the assumption for no influential outliers was met.
Homoscedasticity
Homoscedasticity means that "noise" that exists in any data set is the same in all variables and observations. For the assumption of homoscedasticity to hold all of the dots in the graph have to be roughly the same from the line as other dots. To test it, the plot SPSS Zpred vs Zresid has to be made. In all three plots, the assumption for homoscedasticity holds. No substantial multicollinearity
Multicollinearity is when two or more predictor variables correlate with each other a lot. Since the model used in this research has only one independent variable no test for multicollinearity should be administered. Therefore, there is no substantial multicollinearity in the data set.
Overall, all of the six assumptions of linear regression were met, which allows us to continue further with testing the hypotheses using linear regression.
Hypotheses testing
To test hypotheses 1, 2, and 3 linear regression was used. The first model contains control variables ( age, gender, and education). The second model in the ANOVA table consists of control variables used in model one, alongside with an independent variable. This is done to rule out the possibility of chosen control variables to influence the results.
The results of testing Hypothesis 1: Procrastination will be positively related to self-rated creativity are the following, there is no significant relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity (Table 2).
Table 2 Coefficients table for the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity.
As seen from the table above, none of the control variables showed any significance either. In the second model, R squared adjusted is only .006 this means that the second model consisting of control variables and procrastination as a predictor variable with self-rated creativity as an outcome variable explains only 0.6% of the variance in the model. The results of R squared adjusted with only control variables is 0.9% of explained variance in the model, which is even higher than the model one with predictor variable and control ones. Given the results, this change of -0.3 is not significant as the p-value is >0.05. Unstandardized beta for procrastination in regards to self-rated creativity is -.032, t-statistic is -.736 with a p-value of .462, thus, the relationship is not significant. That being said, procrastination has no relation to self-rated creativity, therefore it does not enhance it. Hypothesis 1 is consequently not supported and rejected. None of the control variables showed any significance.
The outcome of testing Hypothesis 2: Stress will be positively related to self-rated creativity shows that there is a significant relationship between those variables but it is negative.(Table 3).
Table 3 Coefficients table for the relationship between stress and self-rated creativity.
The following results can be drawn from the table, gender as a control variables was significant. R squared adjusted in the first model is .009, that model explains only 0.9% of the variance in the model and not significant. The second model shows the change of .107,
making R squared adjusted in the second model of 0.132. The second model explains 13.2% of the variance and this change is significant. Unstandardized beta for stress concerning self-rated creativity is -.256. So, for every increase in self-rated creativity by 1, stress lowers by .256. Which in turn means, the lower the stress, the higher is self-rated creativity. The relationship between those variables is therefore negative and not positive as it was predicted. T-statistic for stress is -4,383 with p-value of .000, that is < 0.05. Gender also has an effect on the outcome variable in the second model is significant with p-value < 0.05, t-value of 2.02. Unstandardized beta for gender is .129. The conclusion can be drawn that the higher the score of self-rated creativity the higher the chance of respondent being a woman. Taking all of the information above into account, hypothesis 2 is rejected.
When testing Hypothesis 3: Procrastination will be positively related to stress the results display the positive relationship between those variables. The first model is significant with a p-value less than 0.05 and R squared adjusted to .083 (Table 4).
Table 4 Coefficients table for the relationship between procrastination and stress.
As shown above, he first model explains 8.3% of the variance in the model. The second model that has an independent variable shows an R squared adjusted value of .132 and
explains 13.2% of the variance in the model. The change in the value of R squared adjusted is significant, therefore it adds a better understanding of the effects in this model. As in the tests for hypothesis 2, here the control variable gender is significant with p-value < 0.05, t-value of 3.174, therefore affects the result. Unstandardized beta for the gender variable is .229.
Therefore this finding means that females report stress more than males. Procrastination concerning stress was also significant with p-value < 0.05 and at-value of 3.479.
Unstandardized beta for procrastination is .173. It implies that the higher the procrastination levels the higher the stress. Consequently, given the above information, hypothesis 3 is supported.
In order to test Hypothesis 4: Stress mediates the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity, PROCESS macro (model 4) for mediation testing of Hayes (2018) was used (Figure 2).
Figure 2 The model of procrastination as a predictor of follower performance, when mediated by stress. The confidence interval for C was a bootstrapped CI based on 5000 samples.
There is a relationship between independent variable procrastination and the mediator stress, b = .16, SE = .05, t = 3.02, p = .00, 95% CI [ .05, .26 ]. As a control variable gender also has an effect on stress. The following are the values of an effect that gender has on stress, b = .24, SE = .08, t = 3.07, p = 00, 95% CI [ .08, .39 ]. There was also a negative relationship between the mediator stress and the outcome variable self-rated creativity. The values of this relationship are b = -.28, SE = .06, t = -4.55, p = .00, 95% CI [ -.40, -.16 ]. Control variable gender also showed significance, the values are the following b = .13, SE = .06, t = 2.02, p = .04, 95% CI [ .00, .26 ]. Direct effect of procrastination on self-rated
creativity was not proven, with p-value > 0.05. Taking all of the presented above information Hypothesis 4 is therefore supported.
Discission
The main goal of this paper was to answer the research question "How does stress
affect the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity?". Given the results,
several conclusions can be drawn.
Firstly, there is no significant relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. This outcome means that the first hypothesis is not supported. This finding of no relationship between those variables contradicts with a paper of Subotnik et al., (1999). In their paper respondents whose work was related to creativity used to procrastinate more as a tool to boost their creativity levels. In other words, people who procrastinate more rated themselves as more creative in his research. On the other hand, the finding of no relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity also contradicts the work of Lim et al,. (2017). In their paper findings show that people who engage in procrastination score lower in creativity but the relationship is significant. Even though the predicted relationships are different in their positive or negative outcome, nevertheless, in this thesis the relationship between these variables does not exist, implying that there is no negative or positive connection, there is just
no connection. Another possible explanation for such an outcome may be that 50% of the respondents used procrastination as a source for creativity and other 50% did not, resulting in an effect of 0. These contradictory findings are indeed surprising as previous research found the relationship between those variables and the current one did not.
Secondly, another outcome of this paper is a negative relationship between stress and self-rated creativity that had rejected the second hypothesis. This means that the more stress people report, the lower is the level of reported self-rated creativity. Previous research had two different findings on this topic. The paper by Byron & Khazanchi, (2011) and Lim et al,. (2017) showed that anxiety, which is similar to stress, harms self-rated creativity. This outcome supports the results of the current research. On the other hand, in the work of Chun Chu & Choi (2005), another conclusion was presented, namely, that stress leads to higher self-rated creativity as procrastinators work better under pressure. The findings of this paper contribute and support researchers that showed a negative relationship. In other words, the higher the stress, the lower is self-rated creativity.
Another finding in this research supports the third hypothesis and proves that there is a positive relationship between procrastination and stress. The findings of this paper suggest that as procrastination increases, stress increases as well. This conclusion is in line with the paper of Verešová., (2013), where it was found that stress among school teachers is positively related to procrastination. That being said, the more people procrastinate, the higher the stress they may encounter. This particular finding adds to the existing knowledge on the topic of procrastination and stress on the positive relationship between the variables.
Last but not least, the mediation of stress on the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity was found. Even though, no direct effect between the variables was found.
Taken all of the above information into account, future research is needed as some findings of this paper contradict previous research. Thus, further exploration of this topic is needed before any firm conclusions on this topic can be drawn since many research papers show different outcomes compared to the previous research and this paper is no exception.
Limitations, research direction, and practical implications
The findings alongside with contributions of this paper should be looked at with several limitations in mind. The first one is the low reliability of the self-rated creativity scale. Cronbach's alpha of it is 0.651 which is relatively low. It is advised to use variables
with a reliability scale of above 0.8, but between 0.6 and 0.7 is still reasonably good to use but with caution. In the paper of McKay et al., (2017), the reliability of the Kaufman self-rated creativity scale for the "everyday" domain which was used in this paper is 0.81. The reliability of the same scale in their research is higher, even perfect. The difference in the reliability between this paper and their paper might be due to the noise in the data set or to the mean age of the sample. In the research of Ursachi et. al., (2015) their results show that noise, age and other factors influence Cronbach's alpha. Different age groups show dissimilar reliability of the same scale, same with religious beliefs and living area. This particular things might have influenced the reliability of the scale in the current research.
The second limitation of this paper is the sample profile. Sample profile is age, sex, salary and all of the personal information that can be tied to a person. Since this research had mostly students answer the questionnaire the results can be generalized mostly for students. If the respondents were more diverse and inclusive the results could have been potentially generalized for the whole population.
The next limitation is the length of the questionnaire. Almost 400 people had
answered the questionnaire but since it had multiple variables and questions for the papers of other researches many answers were deleted due to missing information. Unfortunately, many people started to fill in the questionnaire and stopped half-way through due to time consumption and length. For future research on this topic, a shorter and more precise survey, only having questions that are related to the topic of research, is advised to gather more respondents.
Last but not least, the control variables could be another limitation. Out of three of the control variables, only "gender" showed significance in predicting two relationships, between procrastination and stress and between stress and self-rated creativity. None of the other two control variables, to be more precise "age" and "education" showed any relevance to the main model. This is surprising as in the correlations table (Table 1), gender, age and education were correlated with other variables. Possible explanation of this occurrence is that
correlations table only shows the relation if one variable goes up the second one goes up as well, same with going down, of both of the variables move in the same direction it is considered a correlation. Regression on the other hand shows a linear relationship between those variables, and even if there is a correlation, there might be no linear relationship. Therefore, summarizing what was said above, further research is needed to get a grasp of
what control variables influence the relationship between procrastination, self-rated creativity and stress.
Future research may be conducted based on these limitations to obtain more
understanding on the topic of procrastination and self-rated creativity. Since many studies in this field contradict each other and the interest in the subject of procrastination is getting more and more every year, further exploration is needed to get a solid, non-contradictory answer if procrastination is related to self-rated creativity or not.
The current paper enhanced the understanding of this topic and confirmed the relationships that were done in other papers. To be exact, this research proved a positive relationship between procrastination and stress and the negative relationship between stress and self-rated creativity. No relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity was found. Furthermore, this thesis showed that stress is indeed the mediator between
procrastination and stress. Gender was significant in the relationship between procrastination and stress and between stress and self-rated creativity. The outcome of the regression shows that women are more likely to feel stressed and are more creative. Moreover, the current contradictory findings can serve as a step forward towards the understanding of such a complex topic and in figuring out the real relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity.
As a result of this report the research question "How does stress affect the relationship
between procrastination and self-rated creativity?" stated at the beginning of this paper could
be answered. Stress serves as a mediator in the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. Procrastination is positively correlated with stress, the more people procrastinate, the higher are the stress levels. This outcome is also influenced by gender, people who score higher on stress have more possibility of being a female. Those results are only true for regression, not for direct correlation. Another outcome is that there is a
confirmed negative relationship between stress and self-rated creativity, the more people score in stress the lower their self-rated creativity. This result is influenced by gender, implying that people scoring high on self-rated creativity have more statistical probability of being a woman only when running regression, not in direct correlation. Last but not least, stress showed to be a mediator in the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. Entailing that even though, the direct relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity does not exist, the indirect effect on this variables still exists.
The aim of this thesis has been to understand how stress affects the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. This aim was achieved by showing that stress mediates the relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity. Regarding the direct relationship between procrastination and self-rated creativity, no relationship was found.
Reference list
Brownlow, S., & Reasinger, R. D. (2000). Putting off until tomorrow what is better done today: Academic procrastination as a function of motivation toward college work. Journal of
Social Behavior and Personality, 15(5; SPI), 15-34.
Byron, K., & Khazanchi, S. (2011). A meta-analytic investigation of the relationship of state and trait anxiety to performance on figural and verbal creative tasks. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 37(2), 269-283.
Chun Chu, A. H., & Choi, J. N. (2005). Rethinking procrastination: Positive effects of" active" procrastination behavior on attitudes and performance. The Journal of social
psychology, 145(3), 245-264.
Cohen, S., Kamarck, T., & Mermelstein, R. (1983). A global measure of perceived stress.
Journal of health and social behavior, 385-396.
Gorvett, Zaria. “The Smart Guide to Procrastination.” BBC Worklife, BBC, 26 Mar. 2019, www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190322-why-prioritising-fun-over-work-will-stop-procrasti nation.
Jarmolowicz, D. P., Hayashi, Y., & Pipkin, C. S. P. (2010). Temporal patterns of behavior from the scheduling of psychology quizzes. Journal of applied behavior analysis, 43(2), 297-301.
Lay, C. H. (1986). At last, my research article on procrastination. Journal of research in
personality, 20(4), 474-495.
Lee, E. H. (2012). Review of the psychometric evidence of the perceived stress scale. Asian
nursing research, 6(4), 121-127.
Lim, J. W., Phang, J. Y., Low, M. Y., & Tan, C. S. (2017). Procrastination is Detrimental to Undergraduate Students’ Self-Rated Creativity: The Mediating Role of State Anxiety.
Creativity. Theories–Research-Applications, 4(1), 99-115.
Maley, A., & Bolitho, R. (2015). Creativity. ELT journal, 69(4), 434-436.
McKay, A. S., Karwowski, M., & Kaufman, J. C. (2017). Measuring the muses: validating the Kaufman domains of creativity scale (K-DOCS). Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity,
Reiter-Palmon, R., Robinson-Morral, E. J., Kaufman, J. C., & Santo, J. B. (2012). Evaluation of self-perceptions of creativity: Is it a useful criterion?. Creativity Research Journal,
24(2-3), 107-114.
Sirois, F. M., Yang, S., & van Eerde, W. (2019). Development and validation of the General Procrastination Scale (GPS-9): A short and reliable measure of trait procrastination.
Personality and Individual Differences, 146, 26-33.
Stead, R., Shanahan, M. J., & Neufeld, R. W. (2010). “I’ll go to therapy, eventually”: Procrastination, stress and mental health. Personality and Individual Differences, 49(3), 175-180.
Steel, P., & Ferrari, J. (2013). Sex, education and procrastination: An epidemiological study of procrastinators' characteristics from a global sample. European Journal of Personality,
27(1), 51-58.
Subotnik, R., Steiner, C., & Chakraborty, B. (1999). Procrastination revisited: The constructive use of delayed response. Creativity Research Journal, 12(2), 151-160.
Ursachi, G., Horodnic, I. A., & Zait, A. (2015). How reliable are measurement scales? External factors with indirect influence on reliability estimators. Procedia Economics and
Finance, 20, 679-686.
Verešová, M. (2013). Procrastination, stress and coping among primary school teachers.
Appendix
-Output for testing assumptions for linear regression
-Homoscedasticity (procrastination - stress)
-Homoscedasticity (stress - self-rated creativity)
-Outliers (self-rated creativity)
-Independence of observations (procrastination - stress)
-Independence of observations (procrastination - self-rated creativity)
