Can creativity promote well-being in the face of stress response flexibility?

Responsible researcher: Viviane Pires Ribeiro

Paper Title: Creativity for workplace well-being

Authors: Erik G. Helzer and Sharon H. Kim

Intervention Location: Global

Sample Size: Not included

Big topic: Others

Main Interest Variable: Creativity

Type of Intervention: Study of the role of creativity in well-being in the workplace

Methodology: Conceptual model

Organizational creativity literature tends to focus on creative outcomes, such as new ideas or useful solutions to challenging problems, that is, effective ways to maximize creativity for the benefit of the organization. However, Helzer and Kim (2019) consider another function of creativity in the workplace, namely, as a resource that can promote well-being in the face of flexibility in response to stress. The central theoretical claim that is developed in the study is that creative engagement with daily stressors can promote psychological health and well-being by facilitating a flexible response to stress.

Assessment Context

Creativity, or the production of ideas that are new and useful, has transitioned from a word to a necessary skill in many of today's most competitive organizations. It is no longer a question of investing in employee creativity, but rather how much. The topic of creativity at work has also caught the attention of many academic researchers. Typically, research on creativity in organizations has largely focused on studying situational factors that promote or distract from creative thinking. This strong interest in understanding how to facilitate (or avoid depressing) creative outcomes reflects the significant role that creativity plays in organizational success, enabling individuals and teams to navigate challenging circumstances.

To date, however, a clear understanding of how the assessment process unfolds is still lacking. Typically, research on appraisals of organizational stressors simply attempts to capture the end result of the appraisal—that is, the ultimate meaning attributed to any particular stressor and how that meaning relates to downstream coping. In contrast, the upstream process, which involves the dynamic construction of meaning from ambiguous stressors, is much less understood. Thus, Helzer and Kim (2019) contribute to this area of ​​research by developing a conceptual model, suitable for organizational contexts, to understand evaluation.

The authors decided to focus on the potential of creativity to shape the stress response in the workplace for two reasons. First, the current pace and pressures of contemporary working life consistently constitute one of the greatest sources of stress, making it a timely and important variable of interest to researchers and practitioners. The impact of physical and mental illnesses on employees and those connected to them (e.g. families, co-workers, etc.) is a consequence that should not be overlooked. Second, stressful environments can be detrimental to creativity. Although some research has examined the positive consequences of stress, other research has shown that stress imposes limitations on cognition and problem solving by narrowing attention, restricting information processing. In short, stress can impair clear thinking, which in turn will make creative tasks difficult to complete.

Intervention Details

Just as creativity is used to solve problems and innovate in the domain of workplace performance, Helzer and Kim (2019) propose that creativity can be used to solve the problem of adapting and responding to workplace stressors. The authors' view is that creativity, if deployed effectively, can enable a flexible response to unexpected or unwanted circumstances, so that people can spontaneously generate alternative interpretations, options, and responses to stressors that may not be apparent to them in less creative states of mind. This view moves away from a traditional focus on whether stress is "good" or "bad" for creative thinking and asks instead how creativity can alter the impact of stressors on workers' ability to solve problems to improve productivity. health. Viewed this way, creativity is a potential source of strength and resilience in the face of stress, rather than just a performance-related outcome provided by ideal work environments.

To develop such a proposal, Helzer and Kim (2019) draw on research and theory spanning a range of academic perspectives, including organizational behavior, health and clinical psychology, and personality and social psychology. The authors take this integrative approach in hopes of advancing research and thinking about creativity beyond its traditional boundaries and outside of the usual disciplinary boxes that can limit understanding of the full range of outcomes that creativity can promote.

Methodology Details

By connecting existing research in management and organizations with complementary findings in clinical and health psychology, Helzer and Kim (2019) explore an alternative view relevant to the importance of creativity in organizational life. In support of this view, the authors present a process model (and supporting data) that explains how creativity can enable a flexible response to stress, so that when in a creative state, people can spontaneously generate interpretations, options and alternative responses to stressors that may not be apparent to them in a less creative state.

Result

The study carried out by Helzer and Kim (2019) progressed as follows. First, the authors describe what stress is and how it affects well-being. They review a model for assessing stress response that has predominated in the literature on stress and coping and has been applied in several organizational studies of workplace well-being. They highlight how appraisal, or the meaning one attributes to potential sources of stress in life, shapes one's psychological response to stress. They further develop a process model to capture the cognitive sequence through which potential stressors in life or work result in psychological distress, as well as an alternative pathway in which potential stressors can be reevaluated to lessen their psychological impact.

Next, the authors reviewed the literature on creativity to specify what creativity is and the broad mechanisms that have been shown to promote it. Taking into account trait and state perspectives on creativity, which describe the manifestation of creativity on different time scales. Then they return to the crux of their argument. Showing how creativity can play an important role in the reappraisal process, drawing parallels between reappraisal and cognitive flexibility, as studied in the literature on creativity. Specifically, the authors argue that creativity may be a cognitive resource that allows people to engage with potential stressors more flexibly; that is, to generate alternative appraisals of the meaning and imagined consequences of the stressor.

Finally, the authors discuss avenues for future research. First, they consider moderators, as well as the role of organizations in promoting creativity for well-being, through both direct and indirect channels. They then examine how mindfulness can play an important role in allowing people to creatively engage with stressors under the same conditions that can typically limit creative thinking. Finally, they speculate on how immersive creativity for well-being can contribute to the long-term health and well-being of workers.

Public Policy Lessons

Concern for well-being in the workplace has come a long way from early attempts to maintain physical safety (i.e., avoid injury and death) to more recent employer initiatives that address work-life balance and general stress management. As researchers and practitioners begin to contemplate future approaches to employee well-being, Helzer and Kim (2019) offer the process model as a possible avenue for further exploration. Specifically, the model advances a theoretical account of cognitive reappraisal that articulates a role for creativity in promoting flexible engagement with potential stressors to improve well-being. More generally, the study argues for reconceptualizing a resource for “work” (i.e., creativity) to improve a “life” outcome (well-being).

By initiating a discussion on the role of creativity in workplace well-being, the authors hope to make the following contributions. First, encourage researchers and practitioners to expand their operational definition of creativity to encompass applications and outcomes that are considered outside the traditional role that creativity is believed to serve at work. Certainly, the value of creativity to produce ideas and solutions in the name of organizational performance should not be minimized; however, the authors argue that these benefits can be leveraged to address other issues important to workers, such as stress management. Related to this point, the study emphasizes the interconnection between well-being and work. Well-being is often considered a special or separate topic in work-related research; however, they argue that well-being is more closely linked to topics like creativity than existing research might suggest.

References

HELZER, Erik G.; KIM, Sharon H. Creativity for workplace well-being. Academy of Management Perspectives , vol. 33, no. 2, p. 134-147, 2019.