Research: How Creative Collaboration Can Strengthen Relationships

When we think about creativity in organizations, we almost always think about how it results in better products, more innovative solutions, more compelling offerings to customers, and more energized employees. One thing you almost never hear at work is, “Could you be a little less creative?” That’s because creativity is almost always associated with positive outcomes for both for the person who is being creative as well as their company. While creativity has clear benefits for the way employees do work and the work they produce, we were interested in better understanding an unconsidered benefit of organizational creativity: it’s ability to facilitate positive social relationships among coworkers. We know that the opposite is true — positive social relationships facilitate creativity — and a wealth of research suggests that teams that have members who like each other and get along tend to produce more creative and innovative solutions. But in addition to positive social relationships facilitating the creative process, can creativity also bring colleagues closer together? To explore this possibility, we first conducted a field experiment to consider whether being in a creative mindset could facilitate positive social experiences. Over a 10-day period, each morning, we randomly assigned a group of 151 working adults — who held a variety of job titles including technical lead, project manager, R&D engineer, branch manager, customer service head, and finance controller — to either a creative mindset condition (where they were asked to think creatively about a problem) or a neutral condition (where they recollected an everyday occurrence). At the end of the day, we asked them to rate several aspects related to their relationships with their coworkers that day. Supporting our expectations, we found that on days they experienced the creativity condition, participants felt more socially close to their co-workers. This social closeness also caused them to engage in less rude behavior towards their co-workers, and they perceived that their co-workers were engaging in less rude behavior towards them. While the findings from this field experiment helped us demonstrate that creativity could facilitate positive social relationships, we wanted to understand more about why this effect occurred. To explore this, we considered the social nature of the creative process and how it might influence the way employees feel about each other. Specifically, while we often think of the lone creative genius as being responsible for most creative work, this is actually not how creativity typically operates in organizational settings. Rather, creativity is a social process — employees share ideas, build off of each other’s suggestions, give feedback to improve a concept, and collaborate to come up with novel and innovative solutions to solve a specific problem. We therefore theorized that this social nature of creativity could help explain why creativity might facilitate positive social relationships among employees. To test this explanation, we ran a series of lab experiments to explore how the social nature of creativity could lead to increased social closeness. In studies two (370 working adults) and three (275 working professionals), we found that brainstorming novel uses for a product caused participants to be more aware that their co-workers were integral to the creative process. In study four (686 working adults), we similarly found that being asked to develop new and novel HR practices caused employees to be more aware of the importance of their co-workers’ role in the creative process. In total, we found that this awareness explained why being in a creative mindset resulted in enhanced social closeness. For example, participants might be reminded of how conversations with a colleague triggered a unique idea, how brainstorming with team members helped identify completely different ways of looking at a problem, or how something they heard in an informal chat with a coworker made them explore an issue in depth. Subsequently, it was this awareness of co-workers as critical to their own creativity that caused employees to feel more socially close to them, and in turn, engage in less rudeness towards them. Finally, we were interested in understanding the situations or contexts in which creativity would be especially likely to facilitate positive social relationships among employees. While creativity is generally a social process at work, it is not always a positive one. Sometimes, employees withhold sharing ideas, keep their thoughts to themselves, and become guarded in a way that the creative process is not likely to engender feelings of social closeness. We found that the key differentiator between which of these effects of creativity might play out was how supportive and psychologically safe the environment was. In other words, when employees worked in supportive environments where they didn’t perceive any risk of thinking differently, being creative tended to result in greater feelings of closeness towards their co-workers. That’s because, in these environments, being in a creative mindset made employees recollect and imagine positive and supportive creative interactions with their colleagues. However, when employees worked in less supportive environments where any mistakes were held against them, the effective of creativity on social closeness was weaker, because these employees tended to recall more negative, less supportive relationships. Based on our studies, we offer recommendations for organizations, leaders, and employees: First, leaders should recognize the power that creativity can have on improving the social connections among employees. Our work suggests that in groups that are struggling to connect with each other, it might be beneficial to give them a few creative tasks, as this can help build social bonds among these employees. Second, organizations should recognize that the positive implications of creativity are amplified in supportive environments. This means that creating environments where employees feel safe sharing their creative ideas — and giving positive feedback to their co-workers, encouraging experimentation and not penalizing employees for mistakes in such efforts — are critical ingredients to leveraging the positive social implications of creativity. Finally, both employers and employees should keep in mind that thinking creatively is one way to reduce organizational rudeness, which has been shown have serious negative implications for performance, motivation, mood, and more. Our work shows that thinking creatively may be a solution to this problem, in that thinking creatively not only reduces the amount of rudeness employees engage in towards their co-workers, but also in how much rudeness employees perceive from them. Overall, our research shows that thinking creatively can have positive social implications in the workplace. While previous work has painted a doom and gloom picture of workplace creativity — showing that it can lead to more dishonesty and deviance — our studies show that there is also room for optimism as it relates to workplace creativity. To help organizations and teams better hone their creative processes, future research should explore in more detail when creativity leads to the positive consequences verses the more negative consequences.

Research: How Creative Collaboration Can Strengthen Relationships

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