Work environments for employee creativity

Abstract

Innovative organisations need creative employees who generate new ideas for product or process innovation. This paper presents a conceptual framework for the effect of personal, social-organisational and physical factors on employee creativity. Based on this framework, an instrument to analyse the extent to which the work environment enhances creativity is developed. This instrument was applied to a sample of 409 employees and support was found for the hypothesis that a creative work environment enhances creative performance. This paper illustrates how the instrument can be used in companies to select and implement improvements. STATEMENT OF RELEVANCE: The ergonomics discipline addresses the work environment mainly for improving health and safety and sometimes productivity and quality. This paper opens a new area for ergonomics: designing work environments for enhancing employee creativity in order to strengthen an organisation's capability for product and process innovation and, consequently, its competitiveness.

Divergent effects of detachment from work: a day-level study on employee creativity

“…We used the following three items from a well-validated Dutch scale for employees' selfratings of creativity (e.g., De Jonge, Le Blanc, Peeters, & Noordam, 2008) that was based on George and Zhou's (2001) scale for employee creativity (cf. Dul & Ceylan, 2011): "My head is full of creative solutions to problems at work," "My head is full of new and innovative ideas about work," and "My head is full of suggestions about new ways of performing work tasks." The average Cronbach's alpha was .89 for the measurement right after work, and .92 for the one before going to sleep.…”

“…The importance of employee creativity applies to all sorts of jobs and organizations, as day-to-day problems occur in any job (cf. Dul & Ceylan, 2011). Especially in a dynamic economic environment, organizations rely on the creativity and flexibility of their personnel to survive.…”

Knowledge workers' creativity and the role of the physical work environment

“…Our data collection in SMEs was rather labor intensive as many companies had to be visited by different assistants using a standardized protocol. However, executive directors of SMEs were motivated to participate in the study because we offered them advice after the analysis of the work environment (Dul & Ceylan, 2011). All data was gathered from knowledge workers who were employed in Dutch SMEs.…”

Staff Nurses Perception Toward Organizational Culture and Its Relation to Innovative Work Behavior at Critical Care Units

“…According to Dul and Ceylan (2010) organizational support the innovation through two aspects: perceived innovation encouragement and adequate supply of resources for innovation. The first refers to the individual's perceptions of the degree of innovation encouragement by the organization.…”