Creativity and the alignment between chronotype and time of day

Autor(en)

Jana Kühnel, Ronald Bledow, Markus Kiefer

Abstrakt

We examine the influence of chronobiological processes on creativity, specifically the influ-ence of a person’s chronotype. Chronotype refers to the setting of a person’s biological clock that gives rise to a distinctive pattern of sleep habits and preferred diurnal activity. We propose a syn-chrony effect and predict that people display peaks in creativity during a work day when the exter-nal clock is aligned with their internal, biological clock. According to our model, positive mood and creative self-efficacy act as affective and cognitive mechanisms of this synchrony effect. We pre-sent a one-day experience sampling study with 339 employees to test our theorizing. In support of our hypothesis, we find peaks in creativity when employees’ biological clocks and the time of day were ‘in sync’. Early chronotypes showed peaks in creativity in the morning, while late chrono-types showed peaks in creativity in the late afternoon. The study further demonstrates that positive mood and creative self-efficacy are parallel mediators of the synchrony effect. We discuss the theo-retical and practical implications of these findings against the background of an embodied cognition perspective on creativity."

Organisation(en)

Institut für Arbeits-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialpsychologie

Externe Organisation(en)

Singapore Management University, Universität Ulm

Journal

Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings

Band

2020

ISSN

2151-6561

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2020.13636abstract

Publikationsdatum

07-2020

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

501002 Angewandte Psychologie

Link zum Portal

https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/de/publications/creativity-and-the-alignment-between-chronotype-and-time-of-day(832221c8-8493-488c-b80a-9814d3b41a9c).html