Paper summary - What makes a creative day? A diary study on the interplay between affect, job stressors, and job control, by Carmen Binnewies, Sarah C. Wörnlein

What I read

In this article, the authors performed a week-long study of interior designers, to identify if the way they felt in the morning, impacted the way they felt about their creativity throughout the day. They made various conclusions, one being that positive affect in the morning, and an intermediate level of time pressure, was related to higher daily creativity.

First, the authors cite existing research indicating that creativity is “key to organizational innovation, effectiveness, and survival.” They indicate that there are few studies that focused on individuals (within-person), and this study will attempt to contribute to that missing set of research data; the overall goal is to understand the factors that “make a creative day.” They describe that this research will help identify if there are interventions that can be implemented to increase daily creativity, and will also fill the gap of the relationship between affect and stressors, and creativity at work. This will include examining the role time pressure plays on creativity.

The authors then define creativity as “the production of novel and useful ideas” where novel ideas are “unique relative to other ideas currently available in the organization” and useful when they “have potential for direct or indirect value to the organization, either in the short or long term.” They indicate that there has also been a distinction made between high and low creative jobs, and they focused their study on those with “high creative requirements.”

The authors then establish a number of hypotheses, based on existing studies and literature. The first relates to the relationship with how employees feel in the morning (positive and negative affect) and their creativity at work for that day. Affect can be classified across pleasure-displeasure, and strength of those attributes. Positive affect is the “extent to which a person feels enthusiastic, full concentration, and pleasurable engagement,” where negative affect is the feeling of being “tense, distressed, and angry.” The first hypothesis, then is that “positive affect in the morning will be positively related to daily creativity.”

The second focus of the study is on the relationship between time pressure and situational constraints, and creative performance. Based on previous studies, their second hypothesis is that “there will be an inverted U-shaped relationship between daily time pressure and daily creativity,” and the third is that “daily situational constraints will be negatively related to daily creativity.” These situational constraints are considered “regulation obstacles or work barriers.”

The authors continue to describe more focus areas for the study. One is that there is a relationship between the freedom an employee has in the workspace “over sequence, time frame, and content of one’s work tasks” and it enables experimentation, and creativity. Another is a relationship between “strong or weak” situations, where a strong situation places “many demands and pressures to conform” an employee.” Control over these things is then hypothesized to amplify a positive relationship between positive affect in the morning, and creativity during the day. The result is their next two hypotheses, first, that “Job control will moderate the relation between positive affect in the morning and daily creativity” and second that “Job control will moderate the relation between negative affect in the morning and daily creativity.”

Two more hypotheses are provided. The first is that there is a relationship between daily time pressure and creativity, and employees who can control that time pressure will be more creative (“job control will moderate the inverted U-shaped relation between daily time pressure and daily creativity”), and the second is that “job control will moderate the relation between daily situational constraints and daily creativity.”

The authors then describe their methodology. They worked with approximately 100 interior designers. The participants first completed a questionnaire. They then responded to two prompts per day, where they were asked to complete a likert-scale survey of their affect in the morning and their creativity in the afternoon. The set of questions for surveys was based on a number of existing scales, such as the PANAS scale. The participants were also asked to write down the “most creative idea they had during the day.”

A number of statistical analyses were performed on the resulting data, and charts and graphs were provided to show evidence of this work.

The authors conclude with a discussion on their findings, limitations of the work, and more generalized implications for researchers. They conclude that:

Positive affect in the morning was positively related to daily creativity at work, and negative affect in the morning was unrelated to daily creativity.

Employees who had little control over their job, negative morning affect was related to negative daily creativity, but high job control did not have the opposite impact, and so job control is not important enough to leverage morning positivity in positive creativity throughout the day. Employees with high job control, when confronted with situation constraints, had less creativity.

Time pressure does not have a relationship with daily creativity for employees with low job control.

The authors show limitations in their study. These include:

Self-reporting bias, which was mitigated by the within-person calculations

The participants were a “rather specific sample of interior architects,” where a high percentage are self-employed and do not work regular hours.

The authors end by stating that diary studies are a valuable way of assessing creativity, and future studies should look at other “moderators” that may be at play in the context of negative affect. More practically, they conclude that positive affect in the morning should be fostered because it impacts daily creativity, and negative affect in the morning should be reduced because it negatively impacts daily creativity. And, they conclude that increasing job control and limiting daily time pressure is beneficial for creativity at work.

What I learned and what I think

I have a number of issues with both the method, the findings, and the value of the study. Maybe my positive affect this morning is low and this will be a less creative response. …

The method is called a diary study. Perhaps this is the accepted name for this study in management contexts, but there was nothing diary-ish about this; a morning quant likert and afternoon quant likert is not what is generally accepted as a diary, which is by almost definition qualitative. I appreciate the idea of interfacing with participants over time, and also throughout the day. But if you have the opportunity to interact with 100 people twice a day for five days, what a waste of 1000 data points! Even if you agree with the stated definition of creativity (I don’t, below), there is so much variance in producing “novel and unique ideas” that one single qualitative question, even loosely coded, about what those ideas actually are would have been so valuable.

Upon another read, it actually looks like they did ask those questions, but didn’t do anything with the answers. But the answers indicate my point:

In addition to the quantitative creativity rating, we asked participants to write down the most creative idea they had during the day to get an impression of what represents creative ideas in our sample of interior architects. The three ideas that participants rated as highest were: "Today, me and my employee presented creative design suggestions and first ideas for the butcher shop of the future to the sales management department", "Today my best idea was to take alternative materials for the kitchen design into consideration", "I could play a positive part and participate in the generation of ideas during the design meeting for a new project". Examples for ideas on days when medium creativity ratings were obtained were "I planned a sitting area for kids where they can fit new shoes," "I developed the color composition for a corridor." On days when participants had lowest ratings of creativity indicated they had "no ideas" and were "busy with routine tasks.”

“Presented creative design suggestions,” “taking alternative materials into consideration,” “playing a positive part in the generation of ideas,” “planning a sitting area,” “developing color compositions”—these are so broad as to be meaningless for a practitioner.

And, I’m back to my unnecessarily emotional response to the accepted definition of creativity as “the production of novel and useful ideas.” It just isn’t that, and particularly in a design context—which is the population they chose to study! The majority, maybe even all design work in someone’s career is probably not novel in any respect, and may not be useful during process. But creativity has nothing to do with novelty in industry. Architects design track housing that has no novelty. Industrial designers make water bottles that are water bottles, the end. And in my world, we make strategies that often emulate other strategies, and software that outright steals from other software. And on the way to a solution, the 90% of work that’s thrown out is not useful in any practical sense of the word, but is creative, and required, because it’s a process.

On the findings side, my issue is related to the need to quantify the survey results. What a thorough analysis, to arrive at such insignificance and outright obvious results, and results that—because of the limitation they describe—can’t be stated with such finality as is proposed with this level of control. There is a huge, huge difference between stating “Positive affect in the morning was positively related to daily creativity at work” and “The respondents’ (self-reported affect) in the morning was positively related to (what the respondents self-reported) as daily creativity at work.” If we’re looking to make hard and fast conclusions, then we’re assessing a feeling of creativity, and not any objectively measured creativity. And leaving work at the end of the day feeling that you’ve had a creatively fulfilling day is wonderful for temperament and happiness, and has nothing to do with what really happened.

And the swept aside limitation of “A high percentage of interior architects is self-employed and does not work regular hours”?! The entire point of the study, and findings from the study, are about feelings at normal (specified) parts of the day!

On value, I get and appreciate the intention. If we can understand the relationship between creativity and efficiency, we can make our workers toil better and we can make more money and the world will be a better place (I’m being both sarcastic and not.) And we should understand creativity more, because making things is the most beneficial thing a person can do for themselves to improve their lived experience.

But to start with the question of if people are more creative when they feel good in the morning is such a play for publication. Use inductive reasoning and call it a day. There are so many parts of creativity to study, parts that can actually improve the human condition.