Status-striving orientation, creative deviance engagement and employee creativity: perspective of structural strain

Purpose This study aims to examine why and when employees engage in creative deviance to develop creativity in China. Drawing on strain theory, the authors examined creative deviance engagement as a mediator and transformational leadership as a moderator of the distinct relationships between emotional and rational status-striving orientations and radical and incremental creativity. Design/methodology/approach Multisource survey data were collected from 126 team leaders and 446 employees in Chinese firms. Multilevel path analysis was used to test the hypotheses. Findings The results show that emotional status-striving orientation relates to creative deviance engagement, which, in turn, has a stronger relationship with radical creativity than with incremental creativity. Furthermore, creative deviance engagement mediates the indirect relationships between emotional status-striving orientation and radical and incremental creativity. Moreover, transformational leadership moderates the above indirect relationships. Originality/value This study is among the first attempts to empirically test the distinct relationships between creative deviance engagement and radical and incremental creativity and further examine how creative deviance engagement mediates the indirect relationships between status-striving orientations and radical and incremental creativity. In addition, the boundary condition of the indirect relationships is investigated. The findings provide valuable insights for the extant literature on status and employee creativity.

With Power Comes Responsibility

Philosophers often take it for granted that the requirements of rationality are universal, that whatever rationality requires of a subject’s reasoning is exactly what it would require of any other subject’s reasoning. This is plausible for some requirements: we all ought to respect modus ponens in our reasoning, for example. However, this chapter argues that many important cases are not like this. These are cases where the rational status of one’s reasoning depends on whether one has a certain cognitive capacity that one is in a position to exercise. The reasoning of one thinker who has a certain cognitive capacity can be rationally appropriate, while the exact same reasoning would not be rationally appropriate for subjects who lack that capacity. If this is correct then what rationality requires of a thinker depends (in part) on what cognitive capacities she possesses. Certain cognitive powers bring with them certain distinctive rational responsibilities.

Defeating the Externalist’s Demons

This chapter is about the New Evil Demon problem for externalist accounts of rationality. The New Evil Demon problem plagues views that hold that what is rational is not solely determined by internal states of the agent. To solve the New Evil Demon problem one has to show that internal state duplicates—agents who share all (and only) the same internal states—always share the same rational status. This chapter argues that Reasons Responsiveness can solve the New Evil Demon problem. It is argued that even though not all internal state duplicates share the same reasons, they do always share the same rational status. The chapter also argues that Reasons Responsiveness solves several problems related to the New Evil Demon problem. These include problems about getting knowledge from falsehoods, non-veridical perceptual justification, and a problem about reacting to reasons I call the New New Evil Demon problem.

The Importance of Being Rational

The Importance of Being Rational systematically defends a novel reasons-based account of rationality. The book’s central thesis is that what it is for one to be rational is to correctly respond to the normative reasons one possesses. The book defends novel views about what it is to possess reasons and what it is to correctly respond to reasons. It is shown that these views not only help to support the book’s main thesis, they also help to resolve several important problems that are independent of rationality. The account of possession provides novel contributions to debates about what determines what we ought to do, and the account of correctly responding to reasons provides novel contributions to debates about causal theories of reacting for reasons. After defending views about possession and correctly responding, it is shown that the account of rationality can solve two difficult problems about rationality. The first is the New Evil Demon problem. The book argues that the account has the resources to show that internal duplicates necessarily have the same rational status. The second problem concerns the ‘normativity’ of rationality. Recently it has been doubted that we ought to be rational. The ultimate conclusion of the book is that the requirements of rationality are the requirements that we ultimately ought to comply with. If this is right, then rationality is of fundamental importance to our deliberative lives.

Underdetermination by Reasons

The norms of rationality determine whether an act is irrational, rationally required, or rationally optional. It has seemed theoretically difficult to make significant room for the last category, because rational status is typically taken to be a function of reasons, and reasons are typically taken to have univocal strength values. But there is also a strong intuition that normal choice situations present us with many equally rational options. If this intuition is correct, two questions arise. The first is how it could be true, assuming that rational status is indeed a function of reasons. The second is whether and how we can act in a non-arbitrary way when we are faced with a choice between a number of equally rational options. This chapter examines four strategies for addressing these questions: incommensurability of reasons, parity, the ubiquity of ties, and a distinction between the justifying and requiring roles of practical reasons.

Moral Reasons and Rational Status

The question “Why be moral?” is open to at least three extremely different interpretations. One way to distinguish these interpretations is by picturing the question as being asked by, respectively, Allan, who is going to act immorally unless he can be convinced to act otherwise, Beth, who is perfectly happy to do what is morally required on a certain occasion but who wants to know what is it about the act that makes it morally required, and Charles, who is trying to understand why rational people act morally. An answer to the question as understood by Allan is, for some, the holy grail of moral philosophy, and it is also perhaps the default understanding of the question. The question as asked by Beth is what David Copp, in his contribution to this volume, calls the “why-think-morality-requires-this” question. The question as asked by Charles can be called the “what-rationally-justifies-moral-behaviour” question. Charles’ question, importantly, is about rational permissibility, and it is most pointed when moral behaviour requires sacrifice.