Curiosity, from the Latin curiositas, is the desire to know. It tends to be considered as a constitutive inclination of people, including animals, which leads to exploration, research and learning. Being curious is linked during all phases of life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood, old age) to an inner vitality that brings interesting benefits, not only necessarily for the individual, but also for his or her environment.

What will I read about in this article?

• A historical review of the impact of curiosity in the workplace
• Analysis of the concept of curiosity
• Positive and negative effects of curiosity at work

A historical review of the impact of curiosity in the workplace

As researcher Filip Lievens and colleagues point out in their paper Killing the cat? A review of curiosity at work. Academy of Management Annals, in recent years the corporate world has realised the importance of having people with high levels of curiosity in their teams.

So much so that some companies have incorporated curiosity as a core value of their organisational culture. However, research on “curiosity in the field of business management” has been very residual, at least compared to other disciplines such as psychology. This is why the team led by Lievens decided to conduct a systematic review of research on curiosity in organisations.

In this article we’ll try to summarise their results and report their conclusions.

What distinguishes curiosity from concepts such as interest or motivation?

The authors of the first review of curiosity in the paper explain that, although curiosity has always been a characteristic examined by scholars (in ancient Greece as a virtue, and in the Middle Ages as a vice), the first modern scientist to study curiosity was Daniel Berlyne.

Berlyne distinguished curiosity between epistemic curiosity (desire or preference for learning) and perceptual curiosity (desire for novel sensory information). Although epistemic curiosity is the most interesting for the corporate world, the authors remind us that perceptual curiosity can be very important for certain professional disciplines or tasks where intuition or creativity are relevant (e.g., fine dining restaurants, or performing arts professionals).

“Berlyne distinguished curiosity between epistemic curiosity (desire or preference for learning) and perceptual curiosity (desire for novel sensory information)”.

Lievens and his team also help to better understand the concept of curiosity by offering a comparison with similar concepts such as learning orientation, interest, intrinsic motivation, intellectual engagement, sensation seeking or passion.

There are some similarities between these concepts and they can coexist in each person, but each addresses a precise reality and has a different purpose. For example, while learning orientation refers to the willingness to learn from mistakes and the desire to repeat difficult tasks in order to become more competent, curiosity does not aim at becoming more competent, but at finding new, hitherto unknown information.

Or, while intrinsic motivation refers to performing an action because it’s stimulating, interesting or pleasurable, curiosity is a desire to freely explore (curiosity is always free) something that was unknown. As a final example, while interest can be defined as attention to a specific area or concept, curiosity is a disposition towards an appreciation of learning.

“We can understand curiosity as a disposition towards knowledge, not limited to one area, but to learning itself, and in a free way”.

Therefore, by comparison with analogous concepts, we can understand curiosity as a disposition towards knowledge, not limited to one area, but to learning itself, and in a free way.

Curiosity cannot be imposed, but it can be stimulated. This is well known to parents and schools that offer stimulating environments (with spaces for exploration), that ask open questions, investigate together, offer unstructured time, read stories, and always reinforce the learning process in a positive way.

Positive and negative effects of curiosity in the workplace 

One of the novelties of Lievens’ systematic review of curiosity at work is that it distinguishes between “internalised” curiosity as an internal property of an individual, from “externalised” curiosity that facilitates organisational action.

In their analysis of internalised curiosity, the researchers distinguish or categorise the results into three domains:

• Curiosity as a catalyst for intrapersonal action.
• The functional and dysfunctional effects of curiosity.
• Curiosity as a catalyst for interpersonal action.

Let’s delve into each one of them.

At the same time, curiosity can have “dysfunctional” effects such as distraction. This is why it is important to know how to “manage” curiosity.

Finally, the review study reveals that curiosity is a catalyst for interpersonal action, as employees with high curiosity tend to foster collaboration, and fluid communication with colleagues, by being more receptive, more open to each other.

Reflections and good practices on how to foster curiosity in the workplace

On the other hand, the study examines how curiosity can be a catalyst for entrepreneurial action, what they call “externalised“ curiosity. The different studies examined reveal that there’s a significant connection between curiosity and leadership. Curious people attract others because of “openness behaviour” and what the researchers call “compassionate curiosity”, as they’re typically open in the way they relate to others and practice listening to others with attention, emotion and honesty.

In turn, it‘s also been studied that when curiosity becomes a shared norm among peers, it facilitates organisational innovation and scientific progress. There are many examples where people with high curiosity have come together in the face of the same challenge (e.g. the development of the internet or LED technology).

Curiosity is therefore eminently positive and, as with young people, can always be stimulated. For companies that wish to do so, it is possible to:

• Foster an open culture, where employees feel free to share their ideas, projects, without fear of being judged.
• Facilitate a supportive culture, where there’s an organisational philosophy of encouraging initiatives that have arisen freely from the employees themselves.
• Offer physical and temporary spaces for the generation of ideas and projects. It can be as simple as providing a regular half-hour space to share ideas and projects.
• Identify people with high curiosity in the organisation and study the implications.

Sources:

• Lievens, F., Harrison, S. H., Mussel, P., & Litman, J. A. (2022). Killing the cat? A review of curiosity at work. Academy of Management Annals, 16(1), 179-216.
• Berlyne, D. E. (1954). A theory of human curiosity. British Journal of Psychology, 45: 180–191.
• Harrison, S. H., Sluss, D. M., & Ashforth, B. E. (2011). Curiosity adapted the cat: The role of trait curiosity in newcomer adaptation. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(1), 211.