In the past 4 years, my research has been focused on creative and proactive behaviors in organizations. Creativity refers to the generation of original and useful ideas, whereas proactivity refers to initiation and implementation of solutions in order to anticipate future problems. Both creativity and proactivity are about novelty and change, and thus important for innovation, but they are not the same, and largely studied in different literatures. In my PhD project, I tried to bridge knowledge from experimental studies on creativity and organizational studies on proactivity. Specifically, I am interested in the cognitive and affective processes that guide creative and proactive behaviors. I study whether the type of thinking (simple vs. complex), feeling (positive vs. negative), and motivation (intrinsic vs. extrinsic) involved in the creative and proactive process, are different. I thus investigated why, how and when people generate good ideas, initiate new ways of working and challenge their leaders to think and act differently. My research is characterized by a variety in methodology (experimental, physiological, organizational studies), types of analyses (single- and multi-level data), and research fields (cognitive, emotional, social and organizational psychology).
In my current postdoctoral project I study how people emotionally respond to performance feedback. How people feel when they receive feedback about how they are doing on a task, depends on several factors. For example, it matters whether the feedback is positive or negative, and whether one expected to do well, or not so well. The main research question is how emotional reactions to feedback influence future performance, specifically in the domain of health behavior, and how the factors mentioned earlier (is feedback positive or negative, and what is expected?) can be used to guide people towards more healthy behaviors. The goal is thus to study how feedback can be used to motivate people to initiate and maintain health behaviors. We focus on several samples (students, health professionals, patients) and research methods (experiments and field studies).