**2. Curiosity**

*"Around here, we don't look backwards for very long… We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things because we're curious… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths"—Walt Disney.*

Curiosity has been described as being essential for human learning and achievement. As broadly defined by Kashdan et al. [19] curiosity is "the recognition, pursuit, and desire to explore novel, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous events" (p. 130). In order to help leaders and managers get curious about curiosity, recent research suggests there are five distinct types of curiosity [19]. Firstly there is the pleasurable experience of discovering something new and finding it intriguing. This is referred to as joyous exploration. This is where people have a love of learning and are generally fascinated about new things. While this aspect of curiosity is therefore associated with positive emotions, the next is more closely associated with negative emotions. This second type of curiosity is known as deprivation sensitivity. This is the sense of frustration caused by the awareness that there is something unknown that is desired to be known. Here people may be annoyed or anxious until they are able to resolve the information gap. The third aspect of curiosity is stress tolerance. This is the result of first noticing that an event is new in some way and worthy of attention, but then being able to cope with the stress associated with navigating the potential uncertainty. The fourth type of curiosity is the reverse of stress tolerance, where rather than just tolerate this stress people actively seek it. This is referred to as thrill seeking and is where the arousal from a novel situation is not something to be reduced but instead is amplified and what makes the situation desirable. The fifth type of curiosity is social curiosity. This is where we are seek information about other people and enables us to empathize with others. This comes about in two ways. Firstly through direct interactions with others we satisfy overt social curiosity to find out about others. And secondly, by indirect means we can have covert social curiosity which is most often used as a means of building self-esteem by comparison with others.

Research into curiosity in organizational settings has found that increased curiosity in an organization leads to greater levels of creativity and innovation [20–23]. But it also supports better decision making, reduced conflicts and allows more open communication [24]. However, while the benefits are well established, organizational culture still often gets in the way. One study found that while 83% of executives say they encourage curiosity, only 52% of employees agreed [25]. Gino [24] suggests that two key reasons for this is that leaders think allowing employees to follow their curiosity will make the organization harder to manage. And secondly, particularly established managers tend to focus on efficiency improvements rather than exploratory efforts. Similarly Kashdan [26] suggests that to encourage greater curiosity in organizations managers need to encourage rather than supress questions internally, emphasize user observations rather than relying on customer surveys, and actively seek different perspectives when making decisions.
