In August this year, Samsung rolled out a new mascot. The little blue alien will function as the Korean company’s avatar in the metaverse and represent the firm across digital channels. It’s cute, with big eyes, pale blue skin, small horns, and a wide chirpy smile.
The idea, the company said in a press release, came from a joke that people make whenever Samsung releases a new, unique product: that the company must have hired an alien to design and develop its innovative technologies.
Samsung’s blue extra-terrestrial can join Android’s green Bugdroid, Xiaomi’s Mi Bunny, and Realme’s Realmeow, among other cute hi-tech avatars.
But if the design and appearance of Samsung’s alien demonstrates the firm’s creativity, its name doesn’t. G∙NUSMAS is just “Samsung” spelled backward. And the alien’s home planet of Nowus-129, is a reversal of the address of the company’s headquarters, 129 Suwon in South Korea.
At some point, Samsung’s creativity appears to have hit a wall.
That’s not what you’d expect from one of the world’s leading mobile phone makers and one of the most innovative technology firms. A company with Samsung’s track record should surely have been able to brainstorm a set of tags more innovative than anadromes. Even musicians produce more creative ideas.
But there may be a connection between overachievement in one field and a lack of creativity in another. And it might mean that a job candidate with a perfect academic record would be the worst person to employ in a job that requires creative thinking.
A new study led by Shen-Yang Lin of Newcastle Business School in the UK has looked at the relationship between perfectionist pressure and creativity. The researchers wanted to know what happens when people who grew up in an environment that demanded high achievement go on to work in companies that demand similar levels of perfectionism.
The result was worrying.
After performing a pilot study, the researchers conducted a survey at a large quality control firm near Beijing. The company the researchers examined inspects and certifies services and products in industries ranging from electronics, chemical and industrial manufacturing to food and metals. The clients are mostly large, multinational corporations.
Although the firm’s work is both precise and technical, interviews with department heads and employees also showed that the company had a constant need for new creative ideas. Employees had to think up new inspection technologies to detect potentially harmful minerals, extend the use of technologies to test a wider range of products, and find high-tech solutions to demonstrate the reliability of their testing procedures.
The researchers distributed questionnaires to the employees and supervisors, asking them to rate on a scale from one to seven statements such as “my supervisor expects me to be perfect,” “I feel uneasy to do something if I am not sure of succeeding” and “at work, I generate ideas revolutionary to the field.” Supervisors rated their employees’ creativity, and the researchers also distributed questionnaires to the employees’ parents, asking them how much they wanted their children to be perfect and to succeed at everything they do.
They then compared the results, looking for correlations between what they called perfectionistic parental expectations, or PPE, perfectionistic supervisor expectations, or PSE, and the employees’ creativity.
What they found was that employees who had grown up in homes that demanded perfect academic scores and then went to work for supervisors who were equally demanding showed relatively low levels of creativity. The two demands for perfection combined to limit the employee’s willingness to take risks and think outside the box. That kind of thinking had a greater risk of generating failure and creating the kind of disapproval the employee had experience at home and would now experience in the workplace.
“For people raised under PPE who then experience high PSE at work, the fear of failure schema they learned early is reinforced by excessively high standards set by supervisors, so that they produce even less creativity at work,” the researchers wrote.
But creativity depends on experimentation, a process for assessing failure. It requires people to do things that no one has thought of doing before, which means there’s no guarantee of success. Some ideas will work and some won’t. The only way to be certain that an idea will produce a desired effect on implementation is to copy an idea that someone else has already implemented and in a similar context. But if you want to do something new, you have to be ready for that new thing to fail—and then try to figure out why it failed.
A supervisor can’t expect employees to move fast and also expect them not to break things.
Perfect Candidate, Imperfect Worker
The research for the study was conducted in China, a place renowned for “Tiger parenting,” a child-rearing approach which pushes children to study constantly and insists on perfect results. The study could be seen then as a way to push back against an education system that piles intolerable pressure on children. By arguing that demands for perfection are not just cruel but ineffective, the researchers are hinting that if parents want their kids to succeed in their careers, they should ease up on their academic demands. And it suggests to Chinese companies that if they want the creativity they need to produce their own versions of Apple and Tesla, they’re going to have to be more forgiving of their employees’ mistakes.
But the study also has lessons beyond China. Employees everywhere look for the best candidates, and they assess them at least in part on their academic records. That might still remain the best approach for the kind of work that demands accuracy over creativity. Accounting firms, for example, might prefer candidates who can produce clear tax statements that can stand up in court over declarations that rely on creative interpretations of statutes. But there are few businesses in which creativity is not a useful trait—including, apparently, product safety testing.
The study suggests however, that the appearance on an academic record of a series of perfect scores might not be a sign of a perfect candidate for a job that requires some degree of creativity. If those academic achievements are a sign of a fear of failure and an unwillingness to experiment, the company could discover that its new employee is less innovative than they need. (Although, of course, the absence of a perfect academic record doesn’t necessarily mean the candidate is any more creative. They might just have faced the same perfectionist standards but were unable to meet them.)
So how can an employee hire someone who looks perfect on paper but still ensure that they act creatively?
The researchers had a couple of suggestions.
The first is for supervisors to ease up on the pressure. The study found that people who were raised by parents who demanded perfection but who then encountered more forgiving supervisors in the workplace fared much better than employees with bosses as demanding as their parents.
“Because their fear of failure is not evoked or reinforced, they may exhibit a greater capacity for creativity at work,” the researchers argued.
So leaders should avoid setting overly high goals for employees and when possible they should consider their employees’ personal, developmental background when deciding the extent to which they impose challenging or aspirational targets. They need to forgive failure, especially when it comes from employees who are known to seek perfection.
The second suggestion though is that leaders seeking to encourage creativity should emphasize that creative problem solving is inherently risky. They should frame undesired outcomes not as failures but as necessary steps in learning and developing more successful solutions.
“In that regard, taking risks and deviating from the status quo should appear essential to employees’ creativity,” the researchers state. Instead of berating failure, they should encourage the effort and experimentation that produces it.
That approach would give failure an entirely new meaning to a demanding workplace and even the most perfectionist employees an entirely new attitude. It might even have given Samsung’s new avatar a more interesting name.
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