Enhancing creativity through workplace design

Examination of interaction effects between personal and contextual characteristics

Abstract

This study conducted a questionnaire survey (N = 2938) to examine the interaction effects on creativity between personal and workplace characteristics. The results show that several interaction effects tend to be different depending on the level of workplace characteristics. In other words, when creativity is encouraged at the low level of some workplace characteristics, creativity of people without creative personality increases, but creativity of the others does not increase. On the other hand, when creativity is encouraged at the high level of some workplace characteristics, creativity of people with creative personality increases, but creativity of the others does not increase or tends to decrease rather. These results will resolve the conflicts in the existing studies on creativity and give an integrated explanation.