Effects of Stress and Co-Rumination on Creativity and Performance

Stress is shown to have a negative impact on individuals, organizations, and society at large. Though research in industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology has examined the relationship between stress and various organizational outcomes, the effects of stress on creativity and performance have seldom been investigated. Furthermore, despite the well-reported buffering effects of social support on the negative outcomes of stress, the potential effects of one type of social support, co-rumination, on organizational outcomes have not been examined. Therefore, using 100 undergraduate students, the effects of stress and co-rumination on creativity and performance were examined. Results did not show that stress and co-rumination exerted negative effects on creativity and performance. However, co-rumination benefited women more than men by improving their creativity levels and performance ratings, and this was inconsistent with our hypothesis. Results of the present study imply that even if individuals are under stress and co-ruminate with their co-workers to deal with stress in the workplace, stress and co-rumination may not necessarily lower their creativity and performance

The Influence of Proactivity on Creative Behavior, Organizational Commitment, and Job Performance: Evidence from a Korean Multinational

Proactivity has emerged as an extremely important behavior in organizations, and has been shown to correlate with very positive organizational and individual outcomes. Proactive personality has been identified as a stable personality attribute that is predictive of several positive work behaviors outcomes. Utilizing a large sample from a well-known and successful Korean multinational employer, this study investigated the influences of proactive personality on three key outcomes in the workplace, namely the level of employee creativity, level of organizational commitment, and in-role job performance. The study also examined whether the contextual factors of quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) and the level of job autonomy affected the influence of proactivity on the three employee outcomes. In the Korean sample, proactive personality was found to be highly correlated with creative behavior, organizational commitment, and in-role job performance. Overall, the results suggest that proactivity along with LMX quality and job autonomy accounted for 53%, 38%, and 23% of the observed variation in employee creativity, organizational commitment, and job performance respectively. In hierarchical multiple regression, proactive personality appeared most influential on variation in creativity and performance. LMX was shown to enhance the impact of proactivity on level of organizational commitment. LMX was also shown to influence the impact of both proactivity and job autonomy on in-role job performance. Theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and recommendations for future research are also presented

Being Different Yet Feeling Similar: The Influence Of Demographic Composition And Organizational Culture On Work Processes And Outcomes

Drawing from self-categorization theory, we tested hypotheses on the effects of an organization's demographic composition and cultural emphasis on work processes and outcomes. Using an organizational simulation, we found that the extent to which an organization emphasized individualistic or collectivistic values interacted with demographic composition to influence social interaction, conflict, productivity, and perceptions of creativity among 258 MBA students. Our findings suggest that the purported benefits of demographic diversity are more likely to emerge in organizations that, through their culture, make organizational membership salient and encourage people to categorize one another as having the organization's interests in common, rather than those that emphasize individualism and distinctiveness among members.(.)Managemen

Do Creative Employees Engage in More Citizenship and Counterproductive Work Behaviors?

Since the turn of the century, research examining the creative process and its predictors has blossomed in organizational research. However, despite the widely accepted notion that creativity is good and leads to great advances in the business world, the outcomes of organizational creativity are relatively unknown and unexplored. While research has started to tackle this gap by examining creativity’s positive role in task performance, creativity’s potential relationship with non-task performance is relatively unknown. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the potential relationships between creativity, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and counterproductive work behavior (CWB). It was hypothesized that creativity would be positively related to both OCB and CWB (and their facets) based on its non-predefined and divergent nature. Further, organizational constraints were examined as a potential moderator of the creativity-non-task performance relationship. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing internet marketplace was used to recruit working adults throughout the United States. Participants (N = 300) completed 2 online surveys containing measures of creativity (subjective and objective), OCB, CWB, organizational constraints, and general demographics. Results from separate path analytic models found support for a positive relationship between creativity and OCB. The more creative an individual was, the more they performed OCBs. Although creativity was significantly related to all facets of OCB, its prediction of engagement in change-oriented OCB was significantly stronger than prediction of OCBs targeting specific individuals or the organization. In contrast, creativity had a significant, but negative, relationship with CWB. This negative relationship significantly differed between dimensions of CWB, where creativity only predicted (negatively) engagement in CWB-O, theft, production deviance, and withdrawal. Additionally, the current study demonstrated how the work environment (e.g., organizational constraints) could impact creative employees and their behaviors. As organizational constraints (e.g., lack of resources) increased in the workplace, the positive creativity-OCB relationship weakened while the negative creativity-CWB relationship strengthened, indicating organizational constraints might reduce the beneficial behaviors of creative employees in the workplace, but will not increase their negative behaviors

Playing at Work : Organizational Play as a Facilitator of Creativity

This thesis investigates how play may benefit creativity in organizational contexts. Play and playfulness have previously been linked to creativity in children and adults, but empirical organizational research is scarce. A widely accepted definition of creativity is that it involves the production of something that is both novel and appropriate. Play is defined as a behavioral approach that is characterized by play being: voluntary, fun, frivolous, imaginative, and in some way bound by structure or rules. An important distinguishing feature of play is that it is frivolous, which means that play is done just for fun and no other results or outcomes are expected. The first study was an exploration of how play is used by organizational consultants to promote creativity, how play was thought to enhance creativity, as well as how play is encouraged in organizational contexts. The results suggested that play promotes organizational creativity via the mediating factors openness, intrinsic motivation, and the collaborative relationships needed to co-create and innovate. The investigation also identified a number of encouragers and discouragers of organizational play. Playful contextual cues and explicit permission to play are examples of encouragers, while imposed play activities and a stressful work environment are examples of discouragers. The second study explored the effect of playful cues introduced during a scheduled workplace meeting versus a control condition receiving a conventional refreshments. The findings suggested that playful cues are a promising means by which to enhance the creative climate and playfulness in workplace meetings. The findings furthermore indicated that introducing play-cues does not risk meeting productivity. The third study investigated the impact of an intervention of playful improvisational theater on organizational creativity. Organizational teams participated in a play intervention that consisted of three workshops of playful improvisational theater. Compared with the control condition receiving no intervention, the intervention group reported an increase of workplace playfulness and scored higher on post-test measures of individual and group creativity. The combined results of these three studies support previously proposed creativity enhancing effects of organizational play. The implications for organizations wishing to enhance creativity and innovation are that fostering a climate of playfulness may be a means of stimulating organizational creativity

THE MEDIATING EFFECT OF CONTEXTUAL CHARACTERISTICS ON COLLECTIVIST DYNAMICS AND ENTITY BASED CREATIVITY AMONG FACULTY IN HIGHER EDUCATION

This study examines the mediating effect of the entity based creativity on the interaction between complexity theory and creativity among faculty members in higher education organizations. The purpose of study was to investigate how mechanisms for intellectual productivity and creativity foster intellectual and disciplinary interactions among faculty members in higher education. The theoretical framework of complexity theory and KEYS model constructs were employed in order to examine how complexity dynamics, motivation, stimulants and inhibitors foster faculty creativity in higher education. The Partial Least Square of Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) was used to analyze data using the PLS algorithm, bootstrapping and predictive relevance (Q2 ) to assess the predictive accuracy on creativity among 73 tenure and tenure-track faculty members in south east research based university in the United States. The result showed that stimulant resource, inhibitors and stimulant new-thinking was identified as constructs with the strongest effect on creativity. The findings also reveal that indicator types like organizational impediments, psychological safety, organizational encouragement, freedom, organizational pressure, fun and novelty/ originality had the greatest impact on faculty creativity in higher education. These outcomes suggest implications for faculty members, research, policy, practice. Finding in this study is consistent with complexity theorists arguments that appropriate amounts of pressure encourages workers to seek creative solutions to challenges in an effort to control that pressure and the issues of trust, confidence and organizational encouragement are important in fostering creativity

Exploring creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the phenomenon of creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs in the organizational setting of their creative industry - haute cuisine. By capturing holistically the complexities and interactions of high-level creativity in high-performance settings, we endeavoured to illustrate how world-leading haute cuisine chefs constructed and understood their experience of being creative and what this can tell us about the nature of creativity more generally. The experiences of our sample of chefs indicate that the phenomenon of creativity is an evolutionary process of 'becoming creative'. Insights into the experience of high-level creativity in a deeply creative commercial setting explain how intra-subjective meaning making of what high-level creativity entails impacts directly on creative outcomes and what this means for creative workers' self-concept, and can be generalized to other settings

Creativity in the Workplace: A Call to Create

Creativity is a vital component in today’s fast-paced society focused on innovation and output. In order to maintain a competitive advantage, organizations are adopting a culture of dynamic adjustment internally. Difficulties in measuring concrete outcomes from creativity can lead organizations to neglect the importance of promoting it in the workplace, subsequently impacting their ability to be successful. Based on the idea that behavior is a complex interaction between person and situation, organizational creativity for the entire system results from the creative outputs of constituent groups and situational. While most of the workplace literature focuses on broad theoretical concepts, creating evaluation instruments, and the assessment of outcomes, very few studies propose comprehensive approaches for organizations to easily reference in order to confidently implement evidence-based practices related to creativity. Given the gaps in literature and difficulties in measuring creative outcomes, organizations may be at a disadvantage, because they do not have a clear path to developing a creative workplace. This literature review summarizes recent research examining workplace creativity with the goal of identifying and connecting best practices, so that organizations can develop creative workplace interventions suited to their respective needs. The impact of organizational practices on creativity are assessed within the context of recruitment, selection, training, and in regards to organizational culture; focusing on antecedents of creativity to guide organizational efforts

An Integrated View of Personal, Relational, and Organizational Resources: How They Ignite Creative Behavior at Work

Individual creativity is an important antecedent of organizational innovation (Amabile, 1988; Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin, 1993; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham 2004). In the current hypercompetitive, global work environment, more managers recognize that in order to remain competitive, they need their employees to be engaged in their work and demonstrate creative behaviors (Mumford, Scott, Gaddis, & Strange, 2002). Therefore, it is important to understand the mechanisms by which individuals demonstrate creative behaviors at work, especially by utilizing the resources that are available to them to facilitate creativity and overcoming the demands that hinder their creative behavior at work. Employing the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, which states job demands and resources can be used to predict motivational processes, and consequently organizational outcomes, I suggested that personal, relational, and organizational resources will promote creative behavior via their influence on intrinsic motivation. In this study, personal resources are comprised of creative self-efficacy and resilience whereas bonding and bridging ties represent the relational resources. Perceived organizational support for creativity comprises the organizational resource. Finally, I examined the moderating influence of a demand in the form of role overload; I proposed that role overload will moderate the relationship between resources and intrinsic motivation. Given the current tough economic times, role overload seems to have become an endemic feature of an employee\u27s work life, and as such can be a meaningful job demand. I proposed that role overload will attenuate the positive impact of personal, relational, and organizational resources positive influence on intrinsic motivation, which in turn lead to creative behavior. In order to test the hypothesized relationships, I collected data from a Fortune 100 organization; 126 employees from that organization filled out the survey and due to missing data 120 surveys were usable. I also collected 22 employee-supervisor dyads using existing validated scales for both groups. I used multiple regression analysis to analyze the data. Results indicated that both perceived organizational support and bridging ties are motivational resources. In addition, creative self-efficacy and bridging ties influenced creative behavior. Moreover, the results revealed that the relationship between bridging ties and creative behavior is mediated by intrinsic motivation. Finally, I observed that employees with bonding ties who experienced high role overload tended to have lower levels of intrinsic motivation. In summary, my dissertation is an attempt to contribute to the creativity literature and Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model. Specifically, this dissertation contributes to creativity literature by unifying several prominent resources in one study and examining their simultaneous influence on intrinsic motivation, which in turn was found to influence creative behavior. Furthermore, I introduced and examined the influence of role overload, as an important contextual factor, which extended our understanding of its moderating influence. My dissertation also contributes to the JD-R model by actually bringing in intrinsic motivation as representing the motivational process, which leads to positive organizational outcomes; thus far, JD-R framework has alluded to its role by looking at engagement as a motivational mechanism for organizational outcomes and not directly examined the contribution of intrinsic motivation in this process. Furthermore, even though theoretically suggested, this study is the first to empirically test the role of resources and demands on creative behavior, thus expanding the boundaries of JD-R. Finally, I contribute to the JD-R model by including relational resources that go beyond the supervisor and co-worker social support by bringing in bonding and bridging relationships outside of the work setting that contribute to positive work outcomes such as creative behavior

Does Knowledge Reuse Make a Creative Person More Creative?

Conference Theme: I.T. and Value CreationIn a business world that everything changes fast, continuous innovation become a key strategy for survival. Knowledge management, which deals with the effective transfer and reuse of knowledge and best practices within a firm, has been theorized as one of the facilitators of organizational innovation. Yet, no organizational innovation can be achieved without the creative performance of their individual employees. This paper examines the effect of the most common type of organizational knowledge management system, that is, an intranet-based knowledge repository, on the level of creative performance of an individual. A controlled experiment was conducted on more than a hundred individuals to investigate the quantitative and qualitative levels of creativity outcomes on an open-ended business task. Their levels of baseline creativity skills were also measured in order to inspect its interaction with knowledge reuse. The results suggest that knowledge reuse resulting from this repository type of knowledge management system actually inhibits the creative performance of individuals, especially on the qualitative dimension. Furthermore, this inhibiting effect is significantly stronger on an individual with higher baseline creativity skills, making a creative person performs less creatively than an otherwise unimaginative person.link_to_subscribed_fulltex