Navigating creative paradoxes: Exploration and exploitation effort drive novelty and usefulness.

Creativity is wrought with competing demands, tensions, and paradoxes. In this study, we examine how people manage 3 such paradoxical tensions (specifically, learning—performance, exploration–exploitation, and novelty–usefulness) when developing creative products. Drawing upon achievement goal theory and theories of self-regulation, we hypothesized that the effects of goal orientations on creativity would be mediated by exploratory effort and exploitative effort. These hypotheses were tested using a sample of 119 undergraduate students. Participants completed 5 sessions of a complex task—an adaptation of the marshmallow challenge (Wujec, 2010)—requiring the development of structures that were both novel and useful. Using multilevel path analysis, the results of this study showed that exploration effort was positively related to product novelty, whereas exploitation effort was positively related to product usefulness. Mastery-approach goal orientation had a significant positive effect on both types of effort, while performance-approach goal orientation led to decreased exploration effort.