Creative Performance of Chinese People: A Social Adaptation Perspective on Contextual Effects

Some scholars believe that traditional Chinese culture is not conducive to creativity, and considerable empirical evidence supports this view, showing that East Asian students in general, and Chinese students in particular, have lower creativity test scores than their Western counterparts. Interestingly, there are also some studies showing that East Asian students are as good as, or even better than, Western students in creativity tests. On the macro level, East Asian cultures rank high in innovation according to the 2009-2010 Global Competitiveness Index: Japan ranks second, Taiwan eighth, Singapore tenth, Korea sixteenth, and Hong Kong twenty third. A simple cultural explanation seems unable to account for these inconsistent empirical findings.We propose that although creative performance is affected by individual difference variables, it is more useful to conceptualize it not as an ability that is fixated, but as a type of performance that is malleable to the influence of the context. The major objective of the proposed project is to develop a model that explains how contextual forces shape the creative performance of Chinese people. To this end, we adopt a social adaptation perspective and posit that in a performance situation, people are motivated to choose the most adaptive course of action to maximize their chance of success. Generally speaking, there is inertia towards creativity, and conformist approaches tend to be default choices for many people. Extrapolating from the theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that attempt to explain the lower creative performance of East Asian students, we propose that performance pressure, task difficulty, and perceived competition tend to suppress creative performance through heightening fear of failure. In addition, we note that different lines of research provide compelling theoretical arguments and evidence for the positive effects of performance pressure, task difficulty, and competition on creative performance, pointing to the operation of moderating variables that shape the effects of these three contextual variables. To address these diverse findings, we propose that support for innovation, pro-creativity norm, and creative self-efficacy can buffer the negative influence of performance pressure, task difficulty, and competition. The first two studies proposed will test these theoretical predictions in the work context as well as in the school context to evaluate their generality. The third study, to be conducted in the work context, will test an extended model developed from the findings of the first two studies. This project has significant theoretical and applied significance.