Creative Workplace Behavior: The Effect of the Three Behavioral Characteristics in Office and Personality

This study conducted a questionnaire survey (N = 2938) examining the relationship between office behavior and creativity. The analysis showed a positive correlation between creativity and three behavioral characteristics (collaboration, flexibility, and demonstration) in an office environment. However, these correlations vary depending on individuals’ personalities. In particular, those with creative personalities cannot augment their creativity if the office does not possess extraordinarily high levels of the three behavioral characteristics as creativity cannot be enhanced very much in an office with only a medium level of these characteristics. At the same time, those who do not have a creative personality can increase their creativity even when they are in an office with a medium level of the three behavioral characteristics. However, turning an office into a place with a) Graduate School of Economics, University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan, inamizu@e.u-tokyo.ac.jp A version of this paper was presented at the ABAS Conference 2018 Winter (Inamizu, 2018). © 2018 Nobuyuki Inamizu. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Annals of Business Administrative Science 17 (2018) 69–82 http://doi.org/10.7880/abas.0180309a Received: March 9, 2018; accepted: April 4, 2018 Published in advance on J-STAGE: April 11, 2018


Introduction
Recent years have seen a growing interest in offices that enhance creativity. 1 Behind the recent popularity of non-territorial offices and the implementation of activity-based working is the intent of management to increase organizational creativity through behavior and workstyles at the office. In addition, some offices champion open innovation. The next section discusses recent trends and research related to office behavior and creativity.
Simultaneously, interest in creativity is increasing in the field of organizational behavior. This study presents some hypotheses by taking the work done by Oldham and Cummings (1996), which is a central thesis on this subject, and discussing surveys and analyses of management research on creativity that focus on personality.
In this study, conducted jointly with Mitsui Designtec Co., Ltd., the hypotheses are examined through a questionnaire survey of approximately 3,000 businesspeople in Japan. The survey results showed a positive correlation between creativity and the behavioral characteristics considered in office environments in recent years, and the study identifies differences in that correlation depending on personality. Finally, the paper suggests office policies that will nurture creativity.

Existing Studies and Hypotheses
(1) Non-territorial offices and creativity Many companies have begun changing over to non-territorial offices, in which employees can freely choose their seats. 2 In recent times, creativity has been garnering more focus than the effective use of space. First, it appears that the actual act of walking around has an effect on creativity (Oppezzo & Schwartz, 2014). Not only that, but some assert that non-territorial offices help to enliven communication with people whom one does not see on a daily basis (Allen, 1977;Allen & Gerstberger, 1973). 3 On the other hand, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) stressed the need for spaces that allow people to concentrate on creative thinking. In fact, Kelley and Littman (2001) (Martens, 2011). In other words, some stages may require people to concentrate on their work, while others may require them to be in communication with several other people. The environment for each of these will differ, and people will choose the place that best fits the stage they are at. ABW is what allows them do so.
(2) Open innovation and the office Open innovation has been a popular topic in recent times. Open innovation is a company's use of ideas from the outside and its having other companies utilize those ideas that are not being used by the company itself (Yonekura & Shimizu, 2015 provides an environment that customers and partners can actually use to make assessments and that enables participation in joint development projects over a certain period of time (Hirai, Takenaka, Takeda, & Ezaki, 2015).
In addition, Yahoo Japan Corporation is making one of its offices non-territorial with the thinking that offices are places for creating innovation. Furthermore, in an attempt to create points of contact for employees, the company has placed the desks in this office in a zigzag pattern, thus making the flow of traffic in the office more complex. The company has also established a coworking space that occupies almost an entire floor, whereby people from outside the company can come in to work and employees can meet with non-employees with the aim of giving rise to new products and services. 5 4 Open innovation is considered to be necessary because of the Not Invented Here (NIH) Syndrome. A famous empirical study of the NIH Syndrome was conducted by Thomas J. Allen, who also experimented with non-territorial offices (Katz & Allen, 1982). However, some have criticized the findings of that study for being arbitrary (Takahashi & Inamizu, 2012). 5 This office is located in the Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioicho (Kioi Residence). https://about.yahoo.co.jp/info/kioicho/ (searched on March The following three characteristics are therefore considered to be part of the recent office configurations and behaviors that enhance creativity.

1) Collaboration: communication and collaboration with other
people or departments in an office.
2) Flexibility: having a flexible workstyle that is not bound by time or place.
3) Demonstration: showing one's company's practices to those outside the company.

(3) Creativity and personality
Many studies on creativity have been conducted in the field of organizational behavior since the 1990s (see Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004, for a review). Among these, the study by Oldham and Cummings (1996) is the central thesis. Oldham and Cummings (1996) suggest that a person's personality is closely correlated with their creativity and that management policies change depending on people's personalities. In particular, those with a creative personality are able to demonstrate a high level of creativity once there is both appropriate work for them and an appropriate management style. Creativity suffers greatly if either of these is missing. Personality must be considered when thinking about creativity and behavioral characteristics at the office and the management policies that promote them.
Based on the above, the hypotheses used in this study are as follows: H1: There is a positive correlation between a person's creativity and collaboration in an office.
H2: There is a positive correlation between a person's creativity and 6, 2018). flexibility in an office.
H3: There is a positive correlation between a person's creativity and demonstration in an office.
H4: The correlation between creativity and the aforementioned three behavioral characteristics in an office vary depending on personality.

Method
In (2) Measurement of personality To measure personality, we used the creative personality scale (CPS) of Gough (1979) in its simplified version (Dul, Ceylan, & Jaspers, 2011). Respondents were asked to describe themselves using the following 16 adjectives: capable, intelligent, clever, wide interests, confident, inventive, egotistical, original, humorous, reflective individualistic, resourceful, self-confident, informal, insightful, and unconventional. Their CPS score was the number of adjectives that they selected.  Table 1 indicates a high correlation between creativity and all three behavioral characteristics in the office. Thus, hypotheses H1, H2, and H3 are supported.

Results
Next, we performed the following analysis to validate H4. First, we divided the sample into four groups: those with low CPS, moderately low CPS, moderately high CPS, and high CPS. We then divided the sample into four groups on the basis of their scores for each behavioral characteristic: low, moderately low, moderately high, and high. Crossing the four CPS groups with the four behavioral characteristic groups creates a matrix of 16 groups. We then plotted  the average creativity of each of these 16 groups (Figure 1).
First, among the groups with low to moderately high behavioral characteristics in the office, the low CPS group tended to increase creativity much more than the group with high CPS ( Figure   1). Conversely, among the groups with moderately-high-to-high behavioral characteristics in the office, the group with high CPS increased creativity much more than the other groups. Interestingly, the group with low CPS tended to decrease, rather than increase, creativity. (However, it must be noted that this trend was not observed in the case of demonstration.) This suggests that the relationship between creativity and behavioral characteristics in the office may change with creative personalities. Therefore, H4 is supported.

Discussion and Conclusion
This study tested four hypotheses regarding the correlation between creativity and behavioral characteristics in an office. The test results identified a positive correlation between creativity and three behavioral characteristics and showed that these correlations vary with individuals' personalities.
Of particular note in the study's findings is that those with a high CPS start to experience great surges of creativity when the office has a high level of the three behavioral characteristics. People with a high CPS are those who have always had creative ideas but are also selfish and individualistic. If one can come up with a creative idea by nature, a lukewarm way of creative behavior at the office may not have anything to do with the idea's generation. In addition, a self-centered and individualistic person may ignore half-hearted policies promoting certain office behaviors. Attempting to further improve the creativity of those with a high CPS may require diligent measures that enable office behaviors at an extraordinarily high level.

Inamizu
Conversely, it is highly possible that those with a low CPS can vastly expand their creativity by increasing their office behavior from a low level to a medium level. Those with a low CPS are highly collaborative but struggle to come up with creative ideas. Therefore, even when a few policies are implemented to encourage behavior that promotes creativity, such people may respond immediately as they are collaborative. In addition, when those who usually have no creative ideas begin to come up with even a few ideas, they may start to believe that their creativity has increased.
However, those with a low CPS may have lower creativity when their office behavior is extremely high. When office policies promoting creativity are implemented across the board, those with a low CPS may not be able to function in such an office. In addition, they may be overly sensitive to the pressure to come up with creative ideas. In fact, it has been noted that excessive pressure harms creativity (Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby, & Herron, 1996).
However, this study has its limitations. The first regards whether the study's findings are specific to creativity. The questionnaire survey actually measures productivity. In particular, this measurement is the sum of responses (measured on a 4-point scale) to the three items (Cronbach  = 0.819) detailed below. 1) I quickly complete the work given to me. 2) I do a high-quality job and complete the work given to me by the deadline. 3) I am generally efficient in doing my work. Figure 2 shows the results of an analysis done on productivity that is similar to the one on creativity. A comparison between Figure 1 and Figure 2 shows no major difference in trends between the two. If we were to note any differences, it could be that 1) even in the group with low CPS, productivity tends to increase with moderately-high-to-high collaboration and flexibility; 2) the differences in productivity between the group with moderately high CPS and the group with high CPS are insignificant; and 3) the demonstration's impact on productivity is less than its impact on creativity. These findings suggest the need to explore phenomena specific to creativity. This would require additional testing.
In addition, the impact of demonstration on creativity appears to be different than the impact of collaboration or flexibility on creativity. In particular, creativity in the group with a low CPS surged with moderately-high-to-high demonstration. On this point, demonstration is a relatively new approach, and few companies currently have very high levels of demonstration. Because of this, it is possible that the study sample may not include an adequate number of offices in this type of company. Also, the fact that the measurement of demonstration is not sufficiently reliable may cause such a result. Moreover, the study's findings were obtained by analyzing cross-sectional data from a self-reported questionnaire survey. Full exploration of a causal relationship is therefore difficult. 6 Despite these issues, the study's findings demonstrate that changing policies that encouraging office behavior based on individuals' personalities can be useful in enhancing organizational creativity.