The Effect of Achievement Motivation Orientation on Creative Outcomes

Achievement motivation is fundamental to how people attend to tasks and is divided into two goal orientations: mastery and performance. This motivation is the foundational force that drives individuals to reach objectives. In addition, when engaging in tasks people are either motivated to successfully achieve task completion (approach motivation) or to avoid task failure (avoidance motivation). Understanding how these motivational goals orientations relate to creative outputs is key because creative individuals become leaders and innovators that drive change for the future, making this understanding important both for our educational system, as well as in the workplace. Creativity is defined as the production of original and high quality products, ideas, or solutions, and is often assessed in two ways: objective evaluations of creative thought and performance, and subjective self-assessments of creativity. For this study, the Elliot and Church (1997) Achievement Goal Items scale was used to measure three achievement goal orientations: mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance. Participants also completed various objective and subjective evaluations of creativity. This study provides insight into the relationship between the types of achievement motivation orientations, self-perceptions of creativity, and creative idea generation tasks at the individual level. Results suggest that individuals who approach tasks with a greater mastery orientation more positively assess their own creative abilities, and generate more creative ideas across a variety of tasks. Additionally, both performance-approach and performance-avoidance goal orientations negatively related to aspects of creativity across a variety of measures