Interdependence Among Creativity, Education, and Job Experience: A Municipal Company in Poland

Abstract

Purpose: The technological progress of production processes causes changes in the social structure of work, i.e. modifies the content of most, if not all, workplaces. In that respect, the identification of changes in the intensity of creativeness, the level of education, and the experience of employees in production processes and occupational tasks is a particularly important issue. The article investigates the interdependence among work creativity, education, and job experience of employees of one of the municipal companies operating in Poland. Methodology: The study employs firm-level data covering over 2,200 observations. The study gathered data from three major internal sources of information: the scopes of responsibilities of organizational positions, personnel documentation regarding the individual level of education and professional experience, and the results of interviews with executive staff and employees on particular posts. The research proceedings base on document analysis, structured interviews, teamwork methods, and a classification technique. Results: Research revealed that the complexity of work increased in the company. Jobs requiring higher levels of creativity are occupied by employees with relatively higher education. However, their average level of education in the analyzed period decreased as opposed to jobs that require relatively lower levels of creativity. The analysis of interdependence between creativity and job experience identified that there emerged a relatively shorter average job experience for employees who perform cognitive work. Moreover, the average job experience increased in the group of employees who perform routine manual and non-routine cognitive work. Implications: The study refers to the job polarization issue by confirming the tendencies of labor markets. It also addresses issues concerned with technological progress, although they are not confirmed by research in this paper. Originality/Value: The main contribution of the paper is the interesting dataset gathered. Furthermore, the paper addresses an interesting question where empirical research at the firm level is lacking, particularly municipal company.