Contrary to the popular notion of the tortured genius, recent research confirms that you don’t have to cut off your ear to whip up wondrous works of creativity. Instead, good moods are more likely to spark inventiveness than bad ones are, report Teresa Amabile, Sigal Barsade, Jennifer Mueller, and Barry Staw in their September 2005 Administrative Science Quarterly article.
Amabile, who heads the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at the Harvard Business School, and her colleagues at the Wharton School and the University of California at Berkeley tracked the influence of mood on creativity in organizations. Their participants were 222 workers at seven companies (three high-tech, two chemical, and two consumer product) who logged electronic diary entries for nearly five months. At the end of each workday, participants spent 10 minutes answering questions about their performance and mood that day.
Defining creativity as “the production of novel, useful ideas or problem solutions,” the researchers found that “positive feelings – joy, love – are positively related to creativity, and negative emotions – anger, fear, sadness – are negatively related to day-by-day creativity,” Amabile told the Harvard University Gazette. Moreover, good cheer can increase the flow of creative juices for up to three days.
After 15 years of teaching creativity to corporations, Gerry Tabio has also observed the powerful effects of positivity. Tabio, a professional facilitator with Creative Resources of Tulsa, Okla., notes: “If I walk into a situation where people are happy, they are more than willing to make a list of possibilities and new suggestions. But if they’re unhappy, they’re so stuck on what is, that they cannot even consider what might be.”
The researchers’ findings are particularly important for nonprofits, notes Barsade, a management professor at the Wharton School. “People feel good about [working at nonprofits], and this is where nonprofits have the edge over corporations,” she says. “They can leverage this feeling … with the payoff of greater satisfaction, productivity, and creativity. The challenge is to keep that positivity alive, to maintain and not reduce it.”
Sandra Malmquist takes an active role in keeping her nonprofit staff happy and imaginative. As director of the Connecticut Children’s Museum and Creating Kids Childcare Center in New Haven, Conn., Malmquist spends time “hanging out on the floor a lot and assessing everybody’s emotional state,” she says. “If I hear or sense that there’s tension, I’ll address it right away.”
One of her teachers’ instructional units on dinosaurs is a testament to the organization’s inventiveness. Children made dino puppets; fossilized their hands in coffee ground dirt dough; counted the number of triangles on a stegosaurus; sang songs about reptiles, birds, and amphibians; and constructed a gigantic 3-D dinosaur out of recycled tubes, paper, and garbage.
Being so emotionally in-tune with her staffers makes Malmquist an exception to many managers, says Barsade. “Managers and staffers often become task oriented, constrained, and scared by organizational realities and budgets. They forget that maintaining a positive mood and supportive attitude can actually help them – not only by creating a better work environment, but also by creating more successful and creative task outcomes,” she says.
Read more stories by Alessandra Bianchi.