Creative Reaction

Last Thursday’s post was about a Harvard Business School study (in progress) on “how the work environment can influence the motivation, creativity, and performance of individuals and teams”.

In our third and final installment we look at what people term, “having a good day” or “having a bad day” (and I’m going to use that word again) - this is something we need to be sensitive about.

The researcher, Professor Teresa M. Amabile, said in an interview,
“We analyzed the connection between the daily events that people reported, their reactions to those events, and the effect of those reactions on their performance, including their creativity as a central aspect of performance”

“There are three main points…

One, people have incredibly rich, intense, daily inner work lives; emotions, motivations, and perceptions about their work environment permeate their daily experience at work.

Second, these feelings powerfully affect people’s day-to-day performance.

And third, those feelings, which are so important for performance, are powerfully influenced by particular daily events…

An example of the influence of these feelings on performance is my finding that if people are in a good mood on a given day, they’re more likely to have creative ideas that day, as well as the next day, even if we take into account their mood that next day. There seems to be a cognitive process that gets set up when people are feeling good that leads to more flexible, fluent, and original thinking, and there’s actually a carryover, an incubation effect, to the next day.”

Lets do what we can to enable our coworkers and staff to have more “good days”. Re-read Last Thursday’s post to remind ourselves what we can do. Pick one thing. Make a conscious effort. And try to tell us it didn’t help…