Qualities of work environments that promote perceived support for creativity

Abstract

This article examines physical and social predictors of perceived support for creativity in the workplace and their effects on important personal and organizational outcomes. Recent conceptualizations of creativity suggest that the physical environment plays a key role in facilitating the development of creative processes and products, yet prior studies have given little attention to demonstrating empirical links between physical and social features of the workplace and employees' subjective experiences of creativity. This study examined employees' perceptions of support for creativity at work as a possible mediator of the relationships between objective measures of distracting stimuli and subjective appraisals of social climate, on the one hand, and self-reported levels of job satisfaction and personal stress, on the other. Results indicated that both recorded levels of environmental distraction and self-reports of social climate are significantly linked to employees' perceptions of support for creativity at work. Moreover, employees' appraisals of support for creativity at work mediate the relationships between their perceptions of social climate and self-reported job satisfaction, social climate and stress, and between environmental distraction and job satisfaction.