The effect of lying in the workplace on the employees’ self-concept and creativity

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The effect of lying in the workplace

on the employees’ self-concept and

creativity

“Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent; it is,

above all, necessary and unavoidable.” H. L. Mencken

Foteini Kariniotaki - Taliani

11374721

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Master Thesis Business Administration

Entrepreneurship and Innovation Track

June 23, 2017

Supervisor: Balazs Szatmari

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Statement of originality

This document is written by Foteini Kariniotaki - Taliani who declares to take full responsibility for the contents of this document.

I declare that the text and the work presented in this document is 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.

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Abstract

Although dishonest behavior is generally viewed negatively in contemporary societies, recent research has connected various forms of unethical behavior with creativity. Creative people tend to be more deceptive and in reverse, dishonesty leads to enhanced creative skills (Gino Ariely 2012, Gino Wiltermuth 2014). The most common form of dishonesty is lying. About 20% of our social interactions involve deception (DePaulo, Kashy et al. 1996). This study aims to examine the relationship of lying in the workplace with the employees’ creativity and self-perception in terms of honesty. To do so, an online experiment was conducted with 161 individuals that were divided into a sample of employees in the United States and a sample of international, European students. The results of the study indicate that lying significantly enhances participants’ creative thinking skills and does not lead them to change their self-perception in terms of morality or honesty. The experiment also reveals that participants were more familiar with lying in the workplace, to colleagues, superiors or customers than to strangers, on a personal level. Ultimately, this study aims to raise one question: since creativity is an attribute that has been long pursued in business, would organizations be willing to alleviate their ethics code against lying, if it led to enhanced creative skills? The findings of this research, also, extend the literature regarding unethical behavior and its connection to creativity.

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Introduction

In the beginning of the 1980s companies and managers started obsessing with creativity and innovation. Now, almost forty years later, this obsession continues to hold. Practitioners and researchers seem to have attempted to pursue innovation and creativity in every possible manner. Corporations took turns of 180 degrees and strived to transform offices into tolerant and pleasant workplaces. Then, managers tried to prevent conflict and find the right incentives for their subordinates to feel comfortable and ultimately, let creativity flourish in their organization. But why is everybody so obsessed with creativity? Why do teachers, employers, artists and scholars, all chase it so persistently when their professions seem to have nothing in common? Everybody treats creativity as if it is the key to success and everybody admires creative people. Researchers’ answer to all this, is that creativity is one of the key factors that drive civilization forward and the study of creativity must be seen as a basic necessity (Amabile, Pillemer 2012). However, research has shown that creativity can have its dark side as well. Studies have acknowledged that creativity can be malevolent or benevolent, regarding the actor’s motivation to deliberately hurt or help others (Cropley, Kaufman et al. 2014). This study will focus on another aspect of dark creativity; its relationship with unethical behavior, and particularly lying.

Creativity is often associated with arts and is considered to be a unique characteristic of original ideas. One may think of Vincent van Gogh or Salvador Dali as two typical representatives of a creative mind because they reinvented the conventions of painting. Although, originality is important, creativity is defined differently in business. Here, to be creative, an idea must also be appropriate and useful for an organization (Amabile 1998). The reason why firms pursue creativity so persistently is its connection to innovation. Creativity is the seed of all innovation. The successful creation of new products, new services, or new business practices starts with a person or a team thinking of a good idea and developing that idea beyond its initial state (Amabile et al. 1996, Sarooghi, Libaers et al. 2015). Individual creativity is inextricably linked with the corporate motivation, resources and skills for organizational innovation (Amabile 1988). Amabile (1998) recommends organizational leaders to necessitate and foster sharing, collaboration and minimize politics within the entire organization. Corporate innovation and individual creativity demand giving autonomy and freedom to employees to conduct their work.

Although Amabile’s model of organizational innovation has been acknowledged by both practitioners and scholars, Sutton (2001) questions its effectiveness and suggests that creative ideas are born solely in intense work environments. The author encourages managers to hire candidates who cannot adjust to the organizational code or provoke fights among their employees to spur creativity. However, these unconventional pieces of advice raise questions regarding whether companies are entitled to behave unethically to enhance innovation and creativity. Furthermore, what would a manager’s position be to an

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6 employee’s unethical behavior that, surprisingly, also leads to enhanced creativity?

Numerous studies indicate that creativity is related to dishonesty in multiple ways. First, Gino and Ariely (2012) highlighted the dark side of creativity; the authors conducted 5 experiments and realized that participants with a creative personality and mindset turned out to have developed more their ability to justify their behavior and thus, indulge in unethical behavior more easily than non-creative individuals. Gino and Wiltermuth (2014) suggest that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: they both involve breaking rules. The authors conducted multiple experiments where participants first had the chance to behave dishonestly by over-reporting their performance and then completed some tasks that measure creativity. Ultimately, the study showed that dishonesty may lead to being more creative on a subsequent task due to the feeling of being unconstrained by rules. Walczyk et al. (2008) pointed out another aspect of the relationship of creativity with dishonest behavior and lying in particular. The researchers’ goal was to examine how much creativity is involved in lying. After asking the participants to answer 18 social dilemmas, where deception offered a desirable resolution, their answers were coded for novelty, effectiveness in achieving the goals called for in the dilemmas in the short term and their likely long-term damage on the liar-target relationship. The findings indicate that people with developed divergent thinking abilities and with the tendency to be ideational (two skills closely related to creativity) tend to lie more and generate more novel, creative and effective lies. Ultimately, the beauty of unethical behavior lies in its payoffs. Mazar et al. (2008) indicate that people behave dishonestly enough to profit but honestly enough to delude themselves of their own integrity. People are often torn between two competing motivations: gaining from cheating versus maintaining a positive self-concept as being honest (Mazar et al. 2008). Self-concept, broadly defined, is a person’s perceptions of him or herself (Marsh at al. 1985). Many mechanisms allow people to act dishonestly but not to be forced to update their self-concept in a negative way; for example, creative people tend to use their creativity to find extraordinary ways to act unethically and then, invent excuses to justify themselves and maintain their positive honesty self-concept.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of lying in the workplace on employees’ creativity and honesty self-concept. Although, studies have indicated that manipulating results and cheating in tests can affect one’s creativity and perception of one’s honesty, up to this moment no study has examined the effect of lying on these notions. Lying can differ from other forms of dishonest behavior due to its high frequency and wide spread use. Lying is a fact of daily life. DePaulo et al. (1996) conducted a study where the participants had to keep a diary with all of their social interactions; on average, participants told two lies per day and lied to almost 40% of the people in their lives. Also, unlike manipulating results and documents, where most of the times original files can prove dishonesty; lying to a person can often not be proven or even identified, since there is no specific trait to explain it (Grover 1993). Literature has not answered yet the question whether

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7 such a common form of behavior like lying, can stimulate creativity. Additionally, the hierarchy and power difference between members of staff in a company increases the particularity of lying as a form of unethical behavior. The relationship of employees with their managers is characterized by power inequality. If a manager is frustrated with an employee’s lie, he/she can react to it by either following directly the organization’s ethics code solution or by imposing a punishment according to his/her judgement and power.

Thus, this study aims to discover whether lying, due to its special characteristics that were explained above, can spur creativity and affect an individual’s honesty self-concept. To do so, an online experiment is conducted and its results are further connected with the implications of lying in the workplace. In the following chapter, a literature review will be presented first. This section will give a definition of creativity in business and highlight its importance for companies by indicating how individual creativity is linked to innovation. Since the study focuses on an extraordinary way of creativity enhancement, it is crucial to highlight why creativity matters for a firm. Later, we will discuss unethical corporate practices of creativity enhancement and elaborate on the literature behind deceptive behavior (inside and outside the workplace) and the connection of creativity with dishonesty. After the literature review, the hypotheses of the study will be presented and discussed. The second section of this thesis will regard the experimental design that was used as a research method and its supporting literature. The analysis section will compare statistically the responses of two different samples that completed the experiment and show whether the results of the analysis supported or rejected the hypotheses. Ultimately, in the discussion section we will discuss the managerial and theoretical implications of this study, its limitations and recommendations for future research. The conclusions of the author will be presented briefly in the final section of the thesis.

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Literature review

This section presents the relative current literature to the topic as described in the introduction section.

The definition of creativity

Creativity is a term that used to be vague for many years, but yet very desirable and popular. First, researchers and theorists related creativity with the personality and intellectual traits of individuals. Then, Carl Rogers highlighted the importance of the creative process: “creativity is the emergence in action of a novel relational product, growing out of the uniqueness of the individual on the one hand and the materials, events, people, or circumstances of his life on the other” (Rogers 1954). Ultimately, scholars adopted a creativity definition focused on the product that could shortly be described in the following way: “novelty that is useful” (Stein 1974). “Creativity is the production of novel and useful ideas in any domain. In order to be considered creative, a product or an idea must be different from what has been done before. However, the product or idea cannot be merely different for difference’s sake; it must also be appropriate to the goal at hand, correct, valuable, or expressive of meaning.” (Amabile 1996).

The components of creativity

Amabile (1988) constructs the componential model of creativity which includes all factors that contribute to creativity, meaning personal factors as well as work environment variables. This model includes three major components of creativity: expertise, creative skills and task motivation. Each of the components is necessary for some level of creativity to be produced; the higher the level of each of the three components, the higher the overall level of creativity would be.

Expertise

Expertise is also known as domain-relevant skills and is considered to be the foundation of all creative work. Expertise includes factual knowledge, technical skills and special talents in the domain in question (Amabile 1988). The term can be viewed as the set of cognitive pathways that may be followed for solving a given problem or doing a given task (Amabile 1996). Alternatively, expertise can be described as the problem solver’s “network of wanderings”. To produce a novel and useful idea or product, one must have profound and extensive knowledge on the imminent subject and the technical issues around it. Broadly conceived, domain relevant skills include familiarity with and factual knowledge on the domain in question: facts, principles, attitudes toward various issues in the domain, knowledge of paradigms, performance “scripts” for solving problems in

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9 the domain and aesthetic criteria (Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987). For example, paradigms of knowledge might include from scientific paradigms to traditional modes of operation in personnel management. Domain-relevant skills constitute the individual’s “raw materials” for creative productivity. It is impossible to be creative in planning a company’s digital advertising strategy unless one has good knowledge of Google Adwords, which websites are more popular and appropriate to host ads or click through rates and prices.

Creative skills

Creative skills regard the “something extra” of creative performance. These skills include the cognitive style favorable for taking new perspectives on problems, an application of techniques for the exploration of new cognitive pathways and a working style conducive to persistent, energetic pursuit of one’s work (Amabile 1996). An individual with developed creative skills is more likely to make new and atypical associations among existing items. This component of the model is responsible for creative outcomes in every process. For example, if an individual has some incentive to perform an activity, his or her performance will be adequately good if the necessary expertise is in place. However, even if that individual is a master or a true expert in the domain, he or she will never produce creative work if creative skills are lacking.

The cognitive-perceptual style most conducive to creativity appears to be characterized by a facility of understanding complexities and an ability to break mental sets during problem solving. Some specific aspects of this cognitive-perceptual style include: (a) breaking cognitive-perceptual set; (b) breaking cognitive set, or exploring new cognitive pathways; (c) keeping response options open as long as possible; (d) suspending judgement; (e) using “wide” categories in storing information; (f) remembering accurately; and (g) breaking out of performance “scripts” (Amabile 1988).

Creativity-relevant skills depend on personality characteristics related to independence, self-discipline, ability to delay gratification, perseverance in the face of frustration and an absence of conformity in thinking or dependence on social approval. However, creative skills, also, depend on training, through which they may be explicitly taught. Alternatively, creative skills can be developed by gaining experience with idea generation, during which an individual may devise his or her own strategies for creative thinking (Amabile 1988).

Task Motivation

Although the components of expertise and creative skills determine what an individual is capable of doing in a certain domain, it is the task motivation component that determines what that person will actually do. Motivation can take two forms (Amabile 1996). Intrinsic motivation is driven by deep interest and

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10 involvement in the work, by curiosity, enjoyment or a personal sense of challenge. Extrinsic motivation is driven by the desire to attain some goal that is apart from the work itself, such as achieving a promised reward, meeting a deadline or winning a competition. A person can have no motivation for doing a task, a primarily intrinsic motivation or a primarily extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations can coexist but still one is likely to be dominant. Amabile (1996) suggests that a primarily intrinsic motivation will be more conducive to creativity than a motivation of primarily extrinsic nature.

In business organizations, motivation can be considered the most important of the three creativity components for two reasons(Amabile 1996). First, it may be the easiest to affect creativity in a direct way because intrinsic/extrinsic motivation is strongly subject to even subtle social influences. For instance, the work environment can have a powerful impact on creativity by influencing motivation. If employees work in a firm that provides them with training seminars or opportunities, the expertise component can be influenced significantly. Likewise, if people work in an environment where managers use or encourage the use of creative-thinking skills techniques, the creativity component might be affected. Task motivation can be influenced in a moment-to-moment fashion by constraints and enablers in the work environment and thus, this component can be affected more frequently and become more important in the long-term(Amabile 1988a, (Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987). Second, no amount of skill in the domain or in methods of creative thinking can compensate for a lack of intrinsic motivation to perform an activity. Without intrinsic motivation, an individual will either not perform the activity at all or will do it in a way that solely satisfies the extrinsic goal. To some extent, a high degree of intrinsic motivation can make up for a deficiency of domain relevant skills or creativity-relevant skills. A highly intrinsically motivated individual is likely to draw skills from other domains, or apply great effort into acquiring necessary skills in the target domain. Ultimately, the componential theory suggests that creativity is most likely to occur when people’s skills overlap with their strongest intrinsic interests and that creativity will be higher, the greater the level of each of the three components.

Expertise Creative Skills Task Motivation Creativity

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The relationship of creativity with innovation

The term of creativity has been studied since the 1950s, however during the last forty years (since the 1980s), creativity started being closely related to innovation. Domestic and international competition, changing government regulations and rapidly shifting market conditions forced corporations to chase constant and visionary in innovation (Amabile 1988). Creativity is often conceived as the “fuzzy front end” of innovation (Koen et al.,2012 cited by (Amabile, Pratt 2016). Innovation, then, is defined as the successful implementation of creative ideas. The strong bond between the two concepts has always been acknowledged in the literature, however recently researchers emphasize on this inter-relation and vagueness of the boundaries between them and studies suggest an integrative definition. “Creativity and innovation at work are the process, outcomes, and products of attempts to develop and introduce new and improved ways of doing things. The creativity stage of this process refers to idea generation, and innovation refers to the subsequent stage of implementing ideas toward better procedures, practices, or products. Creativity and innovation can occur at the level of the individual, work team, organization, or at more than one of these levels combined but will invariably result in identifiable benefits at one or more of these levels of analysis.” (Anderson, Potočnik et al. 2014) p. 2).

Alike the previous section, this one will also elaborate on Amabile’s work on creativity and its connection to organizational innovation. This section will discuss Amabile’s componential model of innovation. Although many researchers have published various theories that examine creativity, innovation and their relationship, the author of this thesis decided to focus on the American scientist’s work not only because her first model has been cited nearly 4000 times since 1988 but, also, because Amabile re-examined her model and recently published a more dynamic revision of it, in November 2016. The author tried to integrate the componential model of individual creativity into the organizational work environment and in 1988 described the influence of the organizational work environment on the creativity of individuals and team and influence in reverse. Figure 2 shows a simplified schematic diagram depicting the major elements of the theory.

The components of organizational innovation Resources in Task Domain

This component includes any kind of resources that are available and can help the company innovate and aid creative work in a targeted area. The interview study (Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987) revealed a wide variety of elements: people with sufficient expertise, skill and interest to do the tasks in request creatively, adequate time for producing novel work in the domain and implementing it, financing to obtain helpful materials and services, access to useful information from various sources and the availability of training.

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12 Resources in the Task

Domain Skills in Innovation Management Motivation to Innovate Innovation External Environment Expertise Creativity Skills Task Motivation Creativity

Indi

v

idual

/G

roup

Creativ

it

y

Organizational Work

Environment impacts

Individual/Group

Creativity

Individual/Group

Creativity Feeds

Organizational Work

Environment

Figure 2. An abstraction of the components influencing innovation and creativity and how they interact

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13 Skills in Innovation Management

This component includes the necessary processes or skills for combining management at both the level of the organization as a whole and the level of units, departments and projects. Research has shown that creativity and innovation are fostered by allowing a considerable degree of freedom or autonomy in the conduct of one’s work (Amabile 1996). Corporations should avoid unnecessary layers of hierarchy, complexity and bureaucracy. The entire organization should host open communication systems to facilitate idea exchange, coordination and collaboration; creative efforts should be encouraged, recognized and rewarded fairly, regardless of outcome(Amabile, Pratt 2016). Furthermore, researchers have highlighted the importance of appropriately matching individuals to work assignments, on the basis of both skills and interests to maximize a sense of positive challenge in the work (Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987). As far as supervision is concerned, Amabile (1988) suggests that it is most likely to foster creativity when it is marked by clear planning and feedback, good communication between the supervisor and the work group and vigorous support for the work of individuals as well as the entire group. Supervision should clearly set overall project goals while allowing procedural autonomy (Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987). Goal setting should be sufficiently clear to direct work toward the ultimate strategic aims of the organization but sufficiently loose to explore for truly new ideas (Amabile, Pratt 2016). Finally, it is important that managers know how to arrange effective workgroups where creativity can flourish. Teams should represent a variety of skills and consist of individuals who trust and communicate well with each other, challenge each other’s ideas in constructive ways, are mutually supportive and are committed to their work (Amabile, Pratt 2016, Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987, Amabile 1996).

Motivation to Innovate

The third component of organizational innovation reflects the basic orientation of the organization toward innovation. Even though this is an organizational-level factor, motivation manifests itself primarily in the statements and actions of founders and high-level leaders; it is them, and other organizational members, who display more or less motivation to innovate (Amabile, Pratt 2016). Apart from high-level leadership members, the individuals in the lower levels play an important role in communicating and interpreting the corporate vision. A true organizational motivation to innovate is marked by a bias toward clear-eyed risk- taking (versus clinging to the status quo), a sense of pride in the organization’s members and enthusiasm about what they are capable of doing, a genuine openness to new ideas, a system for developing creative ideas, and an offensive strategy of leading the organization’s industry into the future (versus a defensive strategy of simply wanting to protect the organization’s past position) (Amabile, Pratt 2016, Amabile 1996). The organizational motivation toward innovation includes the absence of various elements that can become impediments of

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14 creativity, such as political problems, destructive criticism, competition within the organization, strict control by upper management and an excess of formal structures and procedures (Amabile 1996, Amabile, Gryskiewicz 1987).

To summarize, the theory lies on the prediction that elements of the work environment, meaning resources, motivation to innovate and innovation management skills, will impact individuals’ creativity. On the other hand, team and individual creativity serve as the primary source of innovation within an organization. Consequently, the model rests on two key, closely related assumptions (Amabile, Pratt 2016). First, that individual creativity and organizational innovation are inextricably linked. Specifically, the creativity of individuals and teams feeds organic innovation within organizations. Without creative ideas, there is nothing to implement. Within organizations, creativity is affected by the leadership members with the most power, through the strategies they set, the structures and policies they establish and the corporate values they communicate. Creativity is affected by all levels of management, through managers’ everyday practices and the way they handle employees, teams and projects. Consequently, individuals’ creativity is affected by coworkers; everyday attitudes and behaviors, through dyadic interactions and team dynamics. Second, the model assumes a high-level isomorphism between what is needed for individual creativity and what’s needed for organizational innovation. For both processes, the three components are similar: basic resources or raw materials, a set of processes or skills for combining them in new ways and a driver/ motivation.

Why isn’t every organization innovative?

The literature has shown that creativity is important and that it can lead to innovation. After thirty years of research on this topic, innovation is not the vague concept it used to be; academics have done their best to define it and most of all find out how companies can master in it. Teresa Amabile has been very clear in her research throughout the years; along with the components of organizational innovation that were discussed earlier, corporate innovation depends on six managerial practices which enhance a person’s intrinsic motivation to be creative (Amabile 1998). First, managers should assign challenging but not overwhelmingly difficult tasks to their employees and second, give them the autonomy to decide on their own how to deal with them. Third, if managers desire creative outcomes from their teams, they should make sure that there is mutual excitement about their tasks and a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds among all members. Fourth, teams should be provided with adequate but not abundant resources, especially time and money. Fifth, employees should feel that their work matters to the organization; to achieve that, managers should acknowledge creative efforts and reward them according to their final impact. Last but not least, organizational leaders should necessitate and foster sharing, collaboration and minimize politics within the entire organization.

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15 Thus, literature has provided practitioners with so much knowledge and advice on what it takes to foster innovation that one might wonder: why are there still companies struggling with innovation? Why do not companies simply try their best to follow these practices and ultimately, foster innovation successfully? Definitely the recommended practices are not six simple steps that when applied will magically transform an organization to an innovative leader within a month. The success of these managerial practices depends on long-term efforts and on other vigorous factors, such as the specific needs and characteristics of the people working in the company or the dynamics of the specific market. However, one can still wonder what are the reason that prevent a large number of companies from succeeding in innovation.

Robert Sutton gives an interesting answer to this question. The Stanford professor believes all these practices simply do not work (Sutton 2001). Creativity will not flourish in a fun and low-stress environment because the recommended practices it takes to achieve that, simply do not seem rational to managers. The author, after studying creative companies and teams for more than a decade, has discovered that managing for creativity means making counterintuitive decisions like a manager hiring a candidate that he/she dislikes or investing into ideas without sticking to their projected ROI. In other words, Sutton believes creativity comes from stressful situations that challenge individuals. Creative companies and teams, he states, are inefficient and often annoying places to work in. Unlike what we know so far, Sutton’s practices promise to stimulate creativity and increase the range of a company’s knowledge by provoking people to see old problems in new ways and by helping companies to break from the past (Sutton 2001).

Sutton (2001) contradicts Amabile’s theory directly on two major levels. First, he indicates that creativity can only be pursued through conflict. Sutton does not believe that trust and mutual interests stimulate employees’ creativity, he reasons that creative sparks can only come from alert employees who have to fight for their ideas. Instead of encouraging organizational support of sharing and collaboration, this author suggests innovative ideas should not hurry to see the light of day. The most usual critics, like managers or customers, should hear about new ideas only if they have been tested; otherwise their tendency to focus on profitability or what “works fine as it is” will ruin any creative spark. Also, whenever team members get comfortable with each other, managers should create some turbulence and make them fight over their ideas. After each team member has pitched his/her ideas to the team, the strengths and flaws of that new idea should get extensively criticized and evaluated by the rest of the team. Sutton’s second fundamental disagreement with Amabile’s model lies in the element of expertise. The author calls off one of the three components of creativity: expertise. “In the creative process, ignorance is bliss, especially in the early stages. People who don’t know how things are “supposed to be” aren’t blinded by preconceptions.” (Sutton 2001, p. 6). He argues that employers should hire people with skills their company does not need or who have never solved

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16 problems like the ones their company faces. Unlike Amabile, he believes expert knowledge on the domain is mostly capable of producing incremental alterations on existing ideas and rather improbable to lead to radical innovation.

Sutton’s ideas seemingly sound a bit too extreme for the corporate world; in this environment, risks must be minimized and rules must be kept. However, the author presents examples of companies like Hewlett Packard, Xerox and 3M which apply his unconventional guidelines and excel in their fields. In the context of this research, the article raises a crucial question: How far are companies willing to go for innovation? Maybe not the majority but at least some of them are willing to “play dirty”, cross ethical boundaries and provoke tensions or fights among staff members. However, what happens when employees are the ones who behave unethically? Examples of unethical behavior are lying to colleagues or managers, presenting inaccurate and manipulated results of your work or ignoring superiors’ orders. So far most companies either punish harshly or fire their employees in these cases. Would they have the same reaction, if they knew their employees’ unethical behavior indirectly benefits the company? What if it led to increased creativity, the fuzzy front-end of innovation? Would companies still stick to their strict ethics code or would they consider internal policy changes?

Unethical behavior in the workplace

Honesty is a central element in organizational operations. Every day, managers assign tasks to their employees or ask them about the progress of their work. The entire organization relies on the hypothesis that each employee will deliver a report that presents the actual results of his/her work or will give an honest answer. Nonetheless, the employee does not share the manager’s opinion about the importance of being honest and its advantages. For example, a truck driver that records the number of hours on the road, will return home sooner if he claims that he stuck to the speed limit when in fact he exceeded it. It is easy to imagine a situation where an employee is lying about his performance or his true opinion in business. Dishonesty is very common and can certainly have implications on organizations’ function. The most common forms of unethical behavior that may take place in business are lying, cheating and stealing. Lying, though, is the most frequent form of unethical behavior due to the difficulty it demands to identify it and the lack of trait to explain it (Grover 1993). Thus, this research aims to focus only on the effect of lying due to its high frequency in social interactions.

Lying is a functional communication strategy, albeit sometimes a reprehensible one (Backbier, Hoogstraten et al. 1997). A lie is a message from a sender designed to influence a receiver in a specific way and a lie, thus, should not be regarded as an end but as a means to achieve a certain goal (Backbier, Hoogstraten et al. 1997). Furthermore, an answer or utterance is a lie only when the sender knows it to be not in accordance with his or her real opinion, feeling, or knowledge (Backbier,

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17 Hoogstraten et al. 1997). Neither lying nor honesty should be considered character traits but rather specific functions of life situations (Grover 1993).

Although lying is viewed mostly in a negative way in contemporary societies, it is widely used and sometimes, it can be well-intentioned. For example, lying is considered a purposeful tactic in negotiations and is used to achieve desired outcomes (Grover 1993, Lewicki 1983). Negotiators usually lie to the extent their personality allows and to the extent they are rewarded for doing so (Lewicki 1983); this means that negotiators lie as long as they feel it helps them make a better deal and does not harm their relationship with the other party. Then, many individuals might tell white lies. White lies are usually benign and senders use them to rather assist the listener than themselves. A common use of white lies is a situation where one makes a compliment to a friend who could use a boost of confidence, even if the sender’s words are not completely honest. As far as companies are concerned, literature has focused mostly on the self-interest notion to explain deception; this suggests that people will lie in order to promote their interests over other people’s interests. The organizational politics literature explains that people may deceive in order to control resources and conceptualizes resource control as a self-interest commodity (Grover 1993).

Various theorists have tried to explain deception in many ways. First, agency theory indicates that deception is driven by self-interest, but within rational boundaries. This theory predicts deception under conditions of information asymmetry, in which the agent has more information about the work than the principal. It is also crucial that the agent’s behavior cannot be observed (Grover 1993). The agent may deceive the principal if the deception cannot be detected and if it (the deception) will help the agent, but not the principal, achieve his goal according to the company’s reward system. Second, unethical behavior is closely related to organizational reward systems. The theory of ethical ambivalence states that behaviors that get rewarded by organizations may disagree with those expected by some organizational stakeholders (Jansen, Von Glinow 1985). This means that employees might engage in unethical conduct because they feel that this kind of behavior, rather than the expected, ethical one, is rewarded. In fact, there has been some empirical evidence that suggests that managers may behave ethically only to the extent that such behavior is rewarded (Trevino 1986). Third, unethical behavior is linked to role conflict. “A role involves a set of expectations, attached to an office, occupation or title.” (Grover 1993, p.5). Individuals often hold many roles which might demand different or complete opposite expected behaviors at the same time. This conflict of roles and behaviors might be very stressful and individuals may find it difficult or impossible to deal with. In order to relieve the distress caused by role conflict, individuals might (a) choose one of the roles to guide their behavior, (b) avoid the conflict or (c) compromise between the roles by finding a way to meet both demands simultaneously (Grover 1993). Lying is a potential distress mechanism in role conflict. One may behave according to one role and then direct in a misleading way the impression that he/she has also met the demand of the other role. For example, an analyst might have to

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18 prepare reports for the marketing and the sales departments of his company on the same deadline. If the employee has managed to finish only the marketing report he will have met the demands of that role solely. Then, in order to avoid the sales department’s frustration, that employee could decide to lie to them a day before the deadline and tell them that his boss just asked him to prepare some urgent reports, thus the sales report will take a bit longer.

Ultimately, a firm is an environment with unlimited social interactions and lying, inevitably, affects them. Firstly, the frequency and qualitative nature of deception influence how much people like the person lying to them and they evaluate the liar’s overall trustworthiness (Tyler, Feldman et al. 2006). According to Tyler et al. (2006), when people felt that their partner in an encounter was lying to them, they would rate him/her as less trustworthy and would probably like him/her significantly less. The participants in the authors’ studies, also increased the number of lies they told if they felt their partner was lying considerably. On the other hand, if participants felt their partner was honest and kind, their behavior adjusted similarly and less deception was used. The tendency for participants’ frequency of deception to match their partners’ might also be attributed to the chameleon effect, in which people unconsciously alter their behaviors to match those of their interaction partners (Tyler, Feldman et al. 2006). Secondly, Gino, Ayal and Ariely (2009) conducted some compelling experiments to research how people react to the unethical behaviors of others. The authors suggest that even small acts of dishonesty by in-group members can have a large influence on the extent of dishonesty in an organization. Then, techniques that label and characterize the liars or cheaters as out-group members can strengthen the saliency of their behavior and can mature into a useful tool to fight dishonesty (Gino, Ayal et al. 2009).

The dark side of creativity

Creative individuals are considered to be able to take new perspectives on problems and create new and atypical associations among existing items (Amabile 1996). Thus, this production of novel ideas involves a departure from normative behavior or, in other words, a tendency to break the rules (Mumford, Waples et al. 2010, Gino, Ariely 2012). Although, breaking the rules is considered a positive action in the domain of creativity, this is not the case in the domain of ethics. Dishonesty, in specific, involves breaking the social principle that people should tell the truth (Gino, Ariely 2012) and within the corporate environment, it also violates the core value of organizations that employees should be honest to colleagues and superiors. After realizing this common trait of creativity with dishonesty, researchers tried to explore the connection between these two concepts. Can creativity lead to more dishonesty or even, dishonesty to more creativity?

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19 Psychologists have identified two main underlying components of creative performance: divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility. Divergent thinking refers to the ability of individuals to come up with original ideas and to conceive multiple solutions to a certain problem (Gino, Ariely 2012). It involves the “out of the box” way of thinking. Cognitive flexibility, on the other hand, describes the ability of individuals to reshape knowledge in multiple different ways according to changing situational demands, like the increasing complexity of a situation (Gino, Ariely 2012). These two creativity skills are closely related to the dark side of creativity.

“When people are motivated to behave dishonestly so as to benefit financially in a given situation (or to their self-interest in other forms), divergent thinking is likely to help them develop original ways to bypass moral rules.” (Gino, Ariely 2012, p. 2). Apart from helping people act unethically, divergent thinking, also, improves people’s lying skills. Walczyk et al. (2008) conducted an exploratory study to investigate whether divergent thinking enhances one’s ability to lie more creatively and effectively. The researchers generated social dilemmas where lying was an attractive alternative for the main characters (role-played by participants) to escape awkward situations or achieve other goals. For example, a lie in a social dilemma might be used to spare the other person’s feelings or to protect the liar himself/herself and its effectiveness depends on whether it achieves that goal. The participants’ answers and lies were assessed for their effective novelty and impact on the long-term liar-target relationship. The study indicated that one’s divergent thinking ability was positively correlated with the number of lies he/she told. Creative people tended to tell more effective lies; this means that creative lies managed to achieve their immediate goal and minimize the damage in the relationship of the liar – recipient.

In ethical dilemmas, individuals often have to face and consider two opposing interests: the desire to maximize self-interest and the desire to maintain a positive self-concept (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008). Self-concept, broadly defined, is a person’s perceptions of him or herself (Marsh, Shavelson 1985). Individuals behave dishonestly enough to profit from their unethical behavior but honestly enough to maintain a positive self-concept as honest human beings (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008). The researchers suggest that in order to maintain one’s self-concept and resolve this opposition of motivation, one uses self-serving rationalizations. Individuals, in their attempt to find a balance between a positive self-concept and better valued outcomes from dishonest behavior, tend to use their divergent thinking skills to develop original ways to overcome moral rules. Likewise, cognitive flexibility is helping them to reinterpret available information regarding their behavior in a self-serving way. In brief, divergent thinking assists individuals with inventing reasons why he/she could or even should engage in unethical behavior and then, cognitive flexibility helps to temporarily adjust that person’s self-concept in a convenient way. By diverting attention away from moral standards and instead directing it towards justifying desired outcomes, individuals are able to behave as they want without feelings of guilt or hypocrisy (Mai, Ellis et al. 2015). Literature

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20 suggests that creative individuals, due to their two developed creative skills and their ability to invent multiple rational justifications are more likely to behave unethically (Gino, Ariely 2012, Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Mai, Ellis et al. 2015). For example, lying to a counterpart during a negotiation may be justified as “doing my best to maximize my company’s gains” or stealing from a big corporation may be rationalized as having a small impact. Self-serving justifications facilitate unethical behavior because individuals can more fully retain their moral self-image while still engaging in questionable behavior (Mai, Ellis et al. 2015).

Gino and Ariely’ s (2012) study supported that creativity can have negative effects on individuals because they tend to use their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility abilities to, ultimately, engage more frequently in dishonest behavior. Additionally, one of their experiments suggested that creativity is a better predictor of dishonest behavior than intelligence. A pilot study conducted by the authors demonstrated that employees who are in positions that require creativity are more likely to be morally flexible and engage in unethical behavior in the workplace. Two years later, Gino and Wiltermuth (2014) tested the reverse hypothesis: whether dishonest behavior can lead to creativity. Based on the idea that both creativity and dishonesty require breaking the rules, the researchers suggest that after behaving dishonestly, people feel less constrained by the rules. Hence, people are also more likely to act creatively after behaving dishonestly by developing their divergent thinking abilities and constructing associations between previously unassociated cognitive elements (Gino, Wiltermuth 2014). To prove their hypotheses, the two scientists conducted a series of experiments where participants had the chance to cheat in various tasks, like manipulating their prediction on a coin flip, and then measured their participants’ creativity and whether they felt constrained by the rules. The results showed that feeling unconstrained by the rules enhances creative sparks and raised the possibility that people become more creative by acting dishonestly.

Up to this point, studies have solely examined whether creativity is enhanced by cheating and manipulating results on computational and problem-solving tasks. Participants in previous experiments were usually divided in control and cheating conditions-groups. In the control groups the researchers made sure that the participants had no room to cheat by strictly warning them that their answers would be checked and their rewards adjusted accordingly. In the cheating groups, though, researchers usually subtly implied that even if participants cheated, they did not have the means to know it, thus they left some room for dishonest behavior.

Lying, however, is fundamentally different from cheating and manipulating results: lying is always an option in social interactions. Unlike cheating where there will always be files or numbers in a company to disprove it, telling a lie is difficult to identify since there is no specific trait to explain it (Grover 1993). A liar clearly has to think about the impact of his/her words, but often senders can lie spontaneously without having estimated carefully the impact of their deception. Manipulation of data, certainly requires more thought though than telling a lie.

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21 Lying in a corporate environment has two special characteristics. Firstly, it is incredibly common. People use deception in nearly 20 percent of their social interactions (DePaulo, Kashy et al. 1996). This may be due to the fact that lying can save one from a difficult situation in an easy way. Consider children as an example. Although parents and teachers have always talked about the virtue of honesty, won’t most children lie at least once about not having done their homework because they just spent the previous afternoon playing? Lying is rooted in our lives from a very early age and even if nobody states that he/she is in favor of it, the majority uses it due to its effortless nature. Secondly, lying and its potential punishment depend crucially on each company’s ethics policies. Relationships with friends and family are usually based on love and some unwritten rules that both parties have created together. On the other hand, professional relationships are not always based on mutual benevolent feelings but rather need to stick to a code of ethics that was imposed to both parties. Employees may be fired, and prospective employees may fail to gain employment if they lied to acquire a job (Walczyk, Runco et al. 2008). The dynamics of social interactions within a company are completely different from those in personal relationships. The consequences of lying to a friend are not clearly stated anywhere, but on the contrary, the consequences of lying to one’s manager might be. Scholars need to address this difference of context in their research on lying and dishonesty.

The studies regarding the dark side of creativity raised concerns about the way companies should handle their employees’ unethical behavior. Especially if enhancing creativity is close to the company’s values and crucial to its success. Although lying seems to be particularly interesting for the reasons explained above, no study has focused on its relationship with creativity and its effect on the sender’s self-concept. Will lying stimulate creativity on subsequent tasks like cheating did? Maybe due to its high frequency, lying cannot be equally efficient as a stimulus. Furthermore, the literature provides us with no information on how lying affects a person’s self-concept. Due to its high occurrence and wide-spread use, lying might not force actors to use their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility to justify their behavior as in cheating. At this point, literature has assured academics and practitioners that dishonesty, and particularly lying, happens often in social interactions within a firm. Managers would be naïve to ignore these extraordinary findings that connect dishonesty with creativity. Finally, the inevitable and strictly punished unethical behavior that takes place in every company is associated with the greatly desired creativity. This study aims to examine this gap in the literature by exploring the effect of lying in the workplace on employees’ creativity and self-concept.

Hypotheses

The literature review section discusses the concepts of creativity and creative thinking skills. Another quality of creativity is that it can be an insight trait.

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22 Insightfully creative people have the ability to see atypical functions of ordinary objects (Gino, Ariely 2012, Gino, Wiltermuth 2014). This arises because insight creativity is highly associated with divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility (Gino, Ariely 2012, Gino, Wiltermuth 2014, Mai, Ke Michael 2015). Insightfully creative individuals are able to follow unusual cognitive paths and re-structure their existing knowledge or perception of things to conceive new ideas or solutions. For example, an insightfully creative individual will use a pair of keys to cut rope, in the absence of a knife. In this situation, the insightfully creative person will ignore the keys’ typical and primary function of unlocking doors and will recognize that they can cut rope due to their sharp edges. This thought originates from one’s developed divergent thinking which leads him/her to consider whether keys, along with other items, could help in this task since there is no knife. Then, cognitive flexibility guides an insightfully creative person to ignore the keys’ primary function that he/she is aware of and conceive of the new atypical function as means to cut rope.

Similarly to finding an alternative function for a set of keys, people use their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility abilities to maintain their honesty self-concept after behaving dishonestly (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Mai, Ellis et al. 2015). An individual will use divergent thinking to find novel ways of behaving unethically and then will use cognitive flexibility to rethink of his/her moral boundaries in order to maintain an honesty-self-concept. In previous experimental studies (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Mai, Ellis et al. 2015, Gino, Wiltermuth 2014) creative participants were more likely to maintain a positive image of themselves in terms of honesty, after cheating on problem-solving tasks or manipulating their results, compared to non-creative ones. This is explained as an ability of creative individuals to use their creative skills in order to produce more justifications of their unethical behavior and temporarily adjust their honesty self-concept. However, creative individuals were proven to be able to produce a larger number of justifications of their unethical behavior because their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility abilities are further developed.

This study hypothesizes that insightfully creative individuals are inclined to preserve their honesty self-concept in the event of telling a lie more effectively than non-creative ones. Since, previous experiments showed that individuals maintained their honesty self-concept after manipulating results and cheating, this author predicts that lying will not provoke an update of the honesty self-concept either. As it was explained already, lying can occur more frequently and spontaneously than manipulating information because it is often more difficult to predict its impact. Since creative individuals can rationalize their cheating to temporarily maintain their self-concept, they should be able to rationalize their lies as well to maintain their self-concept. Insightfully creative people, after lying, should use their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility to rationalize their behavior and ultimately maintain their honesty self-concept. This study hypothesizes that insight creativity is a moderator in the relationship of lying with

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23 honesty self-concept update, because its presence has been previously proven to positively affect it in the case of cheating (Gino, Ariely 2012).

Hypothesis 1. Insightfully creative people are less likely to update their honesty self-concept after lying, compared to non-creative people.

Generating lies is a task that demands the use of both formerly discussed creativity skills: divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility. For example, an employee who has to inform her boss she will arrive late at the office has the options of telling the truth that she woke up late or of justifying her delay by claiming that her mother was not feeling well and she had to take her to the hospital. If the employee decides to tell the truth, she will not have to make an effort to maintain her positive self-concept as an honest person. This means that there is no need for her to find a proper excuse for her actions neither consider if the way she replied to her boss is ethical and represents her as a person. However, her boss may ask her to make up for the lost time at the end of her shift, so her honesty comes at a price. On the other hand, if the employee decides to lie, her boss will show compassion to her late arrival and wish her mother the best. Before using this excuse, the employee will have to spend some time to make sure it is a consistent and smart one that will change her boss’s focus on her delay to another topic. In other words, our protagonist will need to use her creativity and specifically her divergent thinking abilities to find a convincing alibi. After telling the lie, the employee needs to reflect on whether or not it represents her as a person. Is she the kind of person who would use her mother’s health to justify a one-hour delay at work? Is it right to make her boss worry over her mother’s health and additionally spread a rumor about it? If the employee is determined to avoid extending her shift in the evening to make up for her delay and decides to use a lie, she will try to justify her decision in order to minimize its impact on her self-concept.

This study proposes that insightfully creative individuals are telling more lies compared to non-creative ones. It is logical to assume that creative people put less effort into telling lies as they can produce new ideas readily and thus, are likely to lie more than non-creative people. Creative individuals tend to have divergent thoughts and random ideation more often than non-creative ones throughout the day. This happens due to their developed divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility abilities (Walczyk, Runco et al. 2008). In the example of the late employee, the protagonist invented a good excuse due to her creative skills; however, if she knew herself from previous situations, that she is not good at generating new ideas and convincing lies she would probably choose to tell the truth to her boss. “The ease of having divergent thoughts and the ease of having random ideation throughout the day predisposes individuals to effective social problem solving; then it follows logically that those high in these qualities should also produce a greater profusion of possible resolutions to social dilemmas.” (Walczyk, Runco et al. 2008, p. 13). Previous research has, also, confirmed that

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24 creativity promotes dishonesty in terms of cheating (Gino, Ariely 2012, Gino, Wiltermuth 2014, Walczyk, Runco et al. 2008). Since creative individuals can produce more self-justifications and rationalizations of their unethical behavior they tend to commit to it more often than non-creative ones. Thus, this hypothesis is examining whether or not creativity also promotes lying as it has proven to do with cheating.

Hypothesis 2. The number of lies being told will be positively correlated with the insight creativity of individuals.

When in an ethical dilemma, individuals face two opposing forces: behaving dishonestly to gain more value or escape a difficult situation, against failing to meet their moral standards (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Mai, Ellis et al. 2015). Individuals make use of various mechanisms that allow them to engage in a limited amount of dishonesty while retaining positive views of themselves (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008). Existing literature (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Gino Wiltermuth 2014) has indicated through experimental studies, that individuals after cheating and manipulating their performance in problem-solving tasks, according to which they would be rewarded, did not update their honesty self-concept. The participants’ self-concept maintenance was achieved by producing justifications that rationalized their dishonest actions and their motives behind them.

This study aims to examine whether lying, in a similar way to cheating, will also fail to provoke individuals’ honesty self-concept update. The reasoning behind this assumption lies in the difference of lying compared to cheating, as forms of unethical behavior. Lying is a fact of daily life; it is one of the most frequent and widely used forms of dishonest behavior (DePaulo et al. 1996). Additionally, since lying is hard to identify and there is no specific trait to explain it (Grover 1993), this author anticipates that it is easier for an individual to indulge in telling a lie to someone compared to manipulating the results of a task. Consequently, individuals will need to put less effort in rationalizing their lies compared to rationalizing cheating. Since lying is a frequent form of unethical behavior, it is reasonable to believe that individuals will have practiced the respective mechanisms that allow them to justify it frequently. Thus, since cheating failed to provoke honesty self-concept update, lying is even more likely to fail due to its frequent and effortless nature. In fact, the study hypothesizes that individuals have been exposed to lying to such an extent that regardless of the amount of lies told, a respective number of justifications can be produced without any consequences on the update process of the honesty self-concept.

Hypothesis 3. The amount of lies told will not provoke individuals to update their honesty self-concept.

Gino and Wiltermuth (2014) indicate that unethical behavior and specifically cheating in problem solving activities enhances creativity on a subsequent task

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25 because individuals feel unconstrained by rules. The authors suggested that breaking rules with ethical implications enhances creativity more than breaking rules without ethical implications because in the first case individuals can feel a stronger rejection of the rules. Through results from 5 different experiments, the authors supported the assumption that the lack of constraints enhances creative behavior.

Lying breaks the rule that people should not lie (Gino, Wiltermuth 2014). This social rule implies that honesty is a virtue and one should try to be honest at all times, despite the consequences and the potential effort that this might demand. On the other hand, lying is regarded an undesirable means of reacting to situations and children are advised to avoid it. Western societies often believe that a person who tells lies cannot be trusted. As most social norms, the ones regarding honesty and deception also affect individuals subconsciously during their adolescent and adult life. Although lying is wide-spread among adults, it is often seen from a negative point of view and as a violation of trust in the relationship between the sender and the recipient. Consequently, telling lies is an action with implications in the ethical and social rules the sender was first taught as a young child. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that telling lies means breaking rules with great ethical implications and as literature indicated for other forms of dishonest behavior, it should enhance creativity. In fact, the researcher suggests that individuals who tell more lies will tend to enhance their creative skills to a larger extent because their awareness of breaking social rules will be distinct and more intense. This assumption is crucial to this research as it will provide initial evidence on the potential positive effects of lying within a firm.

Hypothesis 4. The number of lies told will be positively correlated with the use of individuals’ creative thinking skills.

Previous literature has revealed that individuals tend to use their divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility to maintain their self-concept if they have either a creative personality or a creative mindset. An example of a creative personality is an insightfully creative individual, who can generally view atypical functions of ordinary items and creativity is a characteristic that is present in that person’s life overall. On the other hand, having a creative mindset at a specific point of time is a trait that has been stimulated by a previous task. For instance, Gino and Wiltermuth (2014) indicate that cheating in problem solving-tasks can trigger a creative mindset and increase creativity on a subsequent task. Likewise, this study aims to examine whether lying will trigger creativity on a successive task.

After behaving dishonestly, creative individuals use their skills of divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility to maintain their honesty self-concept (Mazar, Amir et al. 2008, Mai, Ke Michael 2015). This shows that a creative individual is more likely to maintain his/her honesty self-concept, because he/she can view moral rules from various perspectives (a sign of cognitive flexibility) and then

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26 produce multiple justifications for behaving unethically (a sign of divergent thinking).

Therefore, this study hypothesizes that individuals who will have enhanced their creativity after lying, will not have updated their honesty self-concept. This researcher believes that after lying has triggered one’s creative mindset, he/she will be able to use more efficiently divergent thinking and cognitive flexibility to maintain honesty self-concept. Individuals with enhanced creativity will be able to produce more justifications about their unethical actions and re-consider the way they view the social rule of honesty in order to maintain the positive view of themselves and ultimately not update their self-concept.

Hypothesis 5. Individuals’ update of honesty self-concept will be negatively correlated with their use of creative thinking skills on a subsequent task.

The hypotheses of this study are depicted in the conceptual model of Figure 4 below.

Method

This section presents the research method that was used in this study and elaborates on its design.

Insight Creativity

Lying Creative Thinking

Skills Honesty Self-Concept Update Number of lies told H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 Insight Creativity Honesty Self-Concept

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Procedure

In order to assess the hypotheses of this study, an online experiment is conducted. The independent variable that is manipulated is lying. The experiment follows a one-factorial, between-subjects experimental design.

The experiment consisted of the following 4 tasks:

1. All participants answered Duncker’s candle problem, a test assessing the insight creativity of individuals.

2. Participants were randomly divided in two groups and were given 5 dilemmas where lying seemed the most attractive way to solve them. According to the independent variable manipulation, the participants were instructed to either not lie in the dilemmas or answer openly. The control, non- cheating, group was instructed not to lie in any dilemma, while the cheating group was not given specific instructions about how they should answer the dilemmas.

3. After lying or not, all participants answered questions regarding their honesty self-concept.

4. All participants completed the creative thinking skills assessment.

Assessment of insight creativity

The first task of the experiment was the completion of the candle problem (Duncker, Lees 1945). Duncker (1945) discusses in his article factors that relate to functional fixedness. The term regards the state where an individual after having used an object for a specific function, cannot think how that object could be used in a dissimilar function. For instance, a stick that has just been used as a ruler is less likely to appear as a tool for other purposes than it would normally be (Duncker, Lees 1945). The problem solver simply does not have the functionally fixed object available as an effective stimulus or, in other words, just does not notice it (Glucksberg, Weisberg 1966).

In this problem, individuals are presented with a picture containing several objects on a table: a candle, a pack of matches, and a box of tacks, all of which are next to a cardboard wall. The task is to figure out, using only the objects on the table, how to attach the candle to the wall so that the candle burns properly and does not drip any wax on the table or the floor. The correct solution involves using the box of tacks as a candleholder: One should empty the box of tacks and then tack it to the wall while placing the candle inside.

The solution is considered a measure of insight creativity because it involves the ability to see objects as performing different functions from what is typical (i.e. the box is not just a repository for tacks but can also be used as a stand). In other words, there is a hidden solution to the problem that is inconsistent with preexisting associations and expectations (Glucksberg, Weisberg 1966, Duncker, Lees 1945, Maddux, Galinsky 2009). An answer can be accepted as correct if the participant thought of using the box as a base for the candle.

The effect of lying in the workplace on the employees’ self-concept and creativity