Creative Processes

My creative process was research about the effects of stress upon creativity in the workplace. The research focused on analyzing the relationship between stress and creativity. They would evaluate the cause of stress in a person in the workplace. Some of the stressors identified included the home strains, supervisors’ work strain, and colleagues’ works strain. The literature further identified the positive effects of stress in promoting creativity, including time pressure that enhances creativity. The negative impact on stressors to work creativity outweighed the positive outcomes. This is because the work stressor leads to poor performance, morale, anxiety by the employees conducting to a reduced level of creativity. The research also expands on neither the positive nor negative effect of stress on creativity, where the two items showed a curvilinear relationship between stress and creativity. Besides this, the study provides a solution needed to moderate the stressors, thus promoting creativity includes a healthy relationship with the supervisors, openness to experience, and incorporating supervisor support. Finally, the study shows an activity that can reduce the high pressure that causes stressors in the workplace and ways to promote creativity, including having “mindless” activities to high pressure and high workload professional schedules.

Through this research, I was able to discover the effect of stressors on job performance and creativity. I got the insight into the need to reduce stressor to improve my creativity level and, therefore, good performance.  Besides, I was able to develop various activities that people can engage in their workplace as a stress reducer and promote creativity among individual members. Teamwork and openness are the keys towards stressor reduction and increase of creativity among the people in the workplace.

Something that startled me about the research is discovering how much the effects of stressors can affect a person’s level of creativity. I have concluded that there is so much to read about stressors and how they affect one’s ability to be creative at job places and any other work. Moreover, the supervisors and colleagues play an essential part in providing a conducive work environment, thus promoting creativity and reducing stressors. I have learned from this research the importance of integration of mindless works, which requires less cognitive input to help reduce the levels of stressors impacting me. This would, in turn, favor me in terms of performance and also creativity. Some of the challenges I experienced when carrying out this research included difficulty in deciding which topic of study to take and lack of sufficient know-how of the methodology to use.  The easiest part of this research was in the final research report, where I was only required to discuss on findings and limitations exhibited.

Part Two

According to the research, stress decreases an organization’s performance.  This is because it decreases an employee’s overall performance, increases error rates, and poor quality work.  Although some researchers argue that added pressure positively affects creativity, stressors bring out health problems such as anxiety and work balance. Therefore, stressors reduce the creativity level in an organization, thus causing stagnation in levels of creativeness.

A case scenario of Mrs. James, a software programmer at Loftacom company limited company, has been shown a drop in performance in her work, and the HRM summons her to disclose what may be the problem. She has a history of being fired from one job to another and has lately been reporting to work late and sleeping during working hours. This has led to latency in the completion of most of her projects. After being summoned, she expressed having stress from home as she has been experiencing marital conflict with her husband, who usually sends her out to sleep on the streets. Besides that, she complains about the harsh treatment by her supervisor in the works place. In addition, she complains of a lack of cooperation from her coworkers as none is willing to work with her making her do most of the tasks alone. This has made her have a lot of stress and unable to balance work and her personal life stress.  This stress has led to poor time management, low morale, poor concentration, poor performance and productivity, and increased employee complaints.

A software engineer is a pretty demanding job and requires high skills, concentration, and creativity to produce better productivity. After analyzing her case, the HRM decided to give her some lighter jobs that she could handle quickly, including writing a schedule for the project. She was assigned another supervisor who works in hand with her, and her colleagues have been cooperating with her. Besides, it is said that she has rented her own house and left her abusive husband. Due to this, her performance has increased drastically. She has come up with a new project for the company, leading her to be promoted as the software engineering department head. The literature review carried out below shows the effects of stressors on creativity and how they can be managed and reduced to understand the case better.

Positive Effects of Stress Upon Creativity

The research indicates some positive effects on creativity. According to Coelho et al. (2011), stress has a positive impact on creativity. The result indicated that areas, where stress leads to the promotion of creativity include the role of conflict in which one perceives discordant job expectations. The others include job complexity, the relationship between a supervisor and the employee, and among the coworkers. This is vital as they can share ideas when one is pressured, thus promoting creativity. Lastly is the relationship with customers in which an increase in demand triggers creativity on how to handle all the customers, such as coming up with new strategies (Vahle-Hinz et al., 2017). also conquer that mentally demanding jobs promote problem-solving, thus increasing creativity.

Negative Effects Of Stress Upon Creativity 

The research also shows some of the negative impacts of stress that reduce creativity; this includes home strain, role ambiguity, a metaanalysis by Byron et al. (2010) and Ng & Feldman (2012) indicated a variance between stress and creativity in which stress had a negative effect on creativity. Han et al. (2017) also conclude that abusive supervision is the core cause of stress in the workplace, thus decreasing creativity levels.

Neither positive nor negative effect of stress on creativity

The research also shows a curvilinear between relationship between stress and creativity. According to Byron et al. (2010), medium stressors did not significantly impact creative performance. Binnewies et al. (2011) show a curvilinear between time pressure and daily activities.

Moderating variables that affect the stress-creativity relationship

The research shows the way in which one can moderate variables that affects the stress-creativity relationship. This includes healthy relationships with the supervisors, openness to experience and incorporating supervisor support, carrying out a metaanalysis study on stress to learn about trait anxiety Baer & Oldman (2006).  Relationship with the supervisor has a significant in determining the level of creativity of an employee (Van Dyne et al., 2002). Finally, is job control to reduce the effect of daily situational constraints on creativity.

Some Interventions To Reduce Stressors And Promote Creativity

Some of the intermediacy that can reduce stressors and promote creativity include having “mindless” activities to high pressure and high workload professional schedules (Elsbah & Hargardon 2006). This will reduce cognitive constraints and lower the performance pressure, thus leading to high cognitive capacity resulting in high creativity.

Part Three

The research study above discovered six ways to reduce work stress to enhance workers’ creativity levels. The first one is encouraging open communication between an employee and their supervisor about the problem they are going through. This includes having LifeLabs offer courses such as emotional regulation, giving difficult feedback, and managing conflict. The second is to bring meditation classes to help the employees relax and rethink about themselves. This encourages the employee to take breaks. This is because high pressure may result in memory loss as a result of stress and anxiety. Encouraging breaks between the day will help the employees return to the office less stressed and more productive (Ryba, 2019). The fourth way is taking the team out on company offsites somewhere fun to get their mind out of the workplace stress and bound them together (Ryba, 2019). Besides, they will be able to form a personal connection with each other and work better as a team. Fifth is considering flexible schedules in which will make lives easier for them as they can take care of the people they love. Finally, bring some diversions into the office where a team home plays together on a special occasion such as video games, dog-friendly office, or ping pong table. With this, they will be able to work together.

To carry out my study, I will carry a random sample of 57 employees (21 men and 35 women) who will participate in the study; 39 of the participants will be over 30 years, and 18 will be 30 years and below. The study would include questioner distributed with 58 items, 22 items on stress, five items on anxiety, and 30 items on creativity. A previous performance graph will be used as the control group. The members are to participate in at least four levels of stress reducer activities for two months, and their performance will be analyzed and compared with their previous performances graph with the new one.