Creativity & Work Environments Promoting Research Proposal

The author's study developed measures through which creativity can be determined; this was a process that was not thoroughly strengthened in Stokols et. al.'s study. Operationally defining the creativity variable would enable the authors to at least make a strong claim that what they were actually measuring is creativity in the workplace, rather than just personal stress and/or job satisfaction. Because of the poor operationalization on the expected outcome variable creativity in the workplace, the study could not definitely say that indeed, the social and physical environments of an employee's workplace is significantly related to creative thinking in the workplace.

More salient than the operationalization problem in the study was also the question of representativeness of the study to employees and organizations in general. A study on creativity in the workplace aims to provide insights on how working conditions -- socially or physically -- help promote or actually deter creative thinking in the workplace. As an empirical study on this important issue in organizations and among employees, it is critical to ensure that the sample type and even the sampling size will be representative for the general population of employees in organizations. As it is, the study surveyed only employees working in the University of California campus -- both employed and not employed by the University. Moreover, the sample size of n=97 was not a statistically robust number for the authors to generalize their findings about creativity in the workplace to the general population of employees and organization. It is possible that, because the respondent criteria are limited and sample size not even statistically robust, the findings are applicable only to the sample studied -- that is, employees working in a campus environment (both University and non-University employees).

Despite the rigorous data analyses that the authors conducted in the study, these results will not be useful for end-users if the variables and measures are not clearly operationalized. In addition, measures must be relevant to the variable being tested, otherwise, the authors will be testing for variables that are not logically related to each other, even if these relationships are tested and found to be significant. Significance is also affected when the sample size is not sufficient, and in this criterion, the study also failed to deliver. Significant relationships generated from the study could actually be not significant to each other if the sample size is increased. Of course this will not be known unless the authors survey a statistically sufficient sample size for the study.

The authors, however, rightfully contended that the study is limited in terms of its applicability in looking at creative thinking in work environments in organizations, since the study looked only into employees/individuals as the primary unit of analysis. The necessity of looking into creativity in the workplace at the organizational level was also acknowledged in previous studies of the same topic, arguing that at the level of the organization, it was found that "work-environment creativity and knowledge sharing can be measured reliably as individual-level constructs…" (Schepers & Van den Berg, 2007:422). Organizational-level determination of creativity is critical, as it is also considered another dimension through which creativity in the workplace will be best understood and empirically defined or operationalized.

References

Amabile, T. (1995). "Work environment differences between high and low creative projects." Paper presented at the Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity Symposium at the Meeting of the Academy of Management. Vancouver, British Columbia.

Schepers, P. And P. Van den Berg. (2007). "Social factors of work: environment creativity." Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 3.

Stokols, D., C. Clitheroe, and M. Zmuidzinas. (2002). "Qualities of work…