Creativity at work: should managers always encourage a good mood?
When a team is looking for a new solution, a manager may be tempted to restore a positive atmosphere before getting started. The more useful question is narrower: should a negative mood be corrected to encourage creativity, or should we first examine what the context allows people to do with it?
What the literature establishes
Matthijs Baas, Carsten K. W. De Dreu and Bernard A. Nijstad (2008, Psychological Bulletin) show in a meta-analysis that the relationship between mood and creativity cannot be reduced to a positive–negative distinction. Positive states are more conducive to creativity when accompanied by high activation and an approach orientation. A pleasant but low-activation mood therefore offers no equivalent guarantee.
Context changes the implications of mood
Jennifer M. George and Jing Zhou (2002, Journal of Applied Psychology) studied the relationships between mood and creativity at work while taking context into account. Their study identifies a favourable association between negative mood and creativity under certain conditions, particularly when recognition of creativity and clarity of feelings are high. It suggests that an unpleasant feeling is not necessarily incompatible with the search for new ideas.
The premature conclusion
It would be unjustified to conclude that managers should sustain dissatisfaction to stimulate invention. A conditional association is neither a management prescription nor a justification for emotional pressure. In SHR's “Emotional Intelligence” programme, these findings can help examine a practical distinction: acknowledging a feeling requires neither suppressing it nor provoking it. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot promise
The field study alone cannot establish a causal effect of mood, while the meta-analysis brings together different tasks and contexts. Producing an original idea does not yet mean designing a solution that is workable, safe or compliant with regulatory requirements. The literature therefore does not support prescribing an optimal mood for every workshop, let alone every individual.
A practical check in Berne
In a Berne-based team working in federal administration, public health, telecommunications or precision manufacturing, a programme exercise could involve opening an improvement workshop without instructing participants to be positive. Instead, the manager would invite each person, without requiring them to disclose their emotional state, to translate a work-related concern into a question to explore. The proposed measure is the proportion of these questions that lead to an idea judged both novel and workable against criteria set before the workshop, with the total number of questions recorded in the minutes. Comparing this indicator across several workshops would help track the usefulness of the approach without claiming to isolate a causal effect of mood. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Emotional Intelligence in Bern
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