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Editor's Note: Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile is in the midst
of a ten-year study looking at, among other things, how time pressure in a
corporate setting affects employee creativity. She recently presented early
findings and an updated working paper to colleagues at the HBS Research
Symposium, and will publish an overview of the work in the August issue of
Harvard Business Review.
In this email interview with HBS Working Knowledge editor Sean Silverthorne,
Amabile talks about her research one of the most complex research efforts ever
undertaken at HBS and the implications for managers who need to keep creative
thinking in their organizations even as time pressures increase.
Silverthorne: What was the genesis of the project? What fascinated you about
the question of time pressure and creativity?
Amabile: Over the course of my twenty-five-year career in research and
teaching, I've been fascinated by the complex effects that time pressure (and
other forms of pressure) had on my own creativity and productivity. And, in
working with many companies, I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: Most
managers and employees hold strong beliefs about how time pressure affects
creativity. But the beliefs are completely opposite!
We wanted to do what few researchers have ever attempted: trap creativity in
the wild...
Teresa AmabileSome people are convinced that time pressure stimulates creative
thinking, and others are certain it stifles creative thinking. There's very
little prior empirical research on time pressure and creativity in
organizations, and the results were somewhat contradictory. Over the past few
years, there's been more and more talk about time pressure in organizations,
and what a prominent feature of the work environment it's become for knowledge
workers (the people who are, ideally, supposed to be doing creative work much
of the time!). My HBS colleague Leslie Perlow has identified a "time famine" in
corporate America today. Given the prominence of time pressure in people's work
lives, the contradictory intuitions that people hold about its effects, and the
dearth of rigorous empirical research, my research team and I set out to tackle
the problem.
My research team and I investigated time pressure and creativity as part of a
multi-year research program in which we had a large number of organizational
employees 238 individuals on 26 project teams in 7 companies in 3 industries
fill out a brief electronic diary every day during the entire course of a
creative project they were doing in their jobs.
Q: The methodology and complexity of the research itself is staggering. Why did
you employ the "diary" method of quizzing employees, and how difficult was that
process to manage?
A: We wanted to do what few researchers have ever attempted: "trap creativity
in the wild" in organizations, by observing it as it was happening within teams
who are supposed to be doing creative work. We believed that the best way to
get real-time information on these individuals, the teams, and their work, in a
relatively unobtrusive way, was to have the participants fill out an electronic
"Daily Questionnaire" (DQ) for us.
Every workday, Monday through Friday, the HBS computer emailed the DQ to
everyone participating in the study; we asked participants to fill it out and
send it back by the end of the day. Each team did this through their entire
project (or project phase) that we were studying (anywhere from five weeks up
to nine months).
Of course, the process was very difficult to manage, requiring intense
attention from my research associates and me. I met personally with each
participating team four times during their participation:
An initial recruiting meeting, where I explained what participation would
involve and what the team would get in return (about 50 percent of the
recruited teams agreed to participate).
A briefing meeting before their project started, in which I explained the study
in more detail, answered questions, and helped them practice completing the DQ.
A mid-study check-in meeting to see how they were doing and answer further
questions.
A final results workshop, in which we presented our preliminary findings to the
team and helped them think through how to use the results to improve their
work. After studying four or five teams in a given company, we also met with
the management team of the organization to share our general findings with them
and to hear their interpretation of the results.
I think that participants were so conscientious (returning fully 75 percent of
all the DQs we sent out to them) because (1) they felt that they were going to
get a truly unique look at their team and themselves; (2) we established a
personal connection with them in the early meetings and maintained that through
regular phone calls and emails from me and my RAs; and (3) we tried to make it
fun by giving them little gifts at the meetings (like "TEAM Study" coffee
mugs), and including jokes and trivia questions at the end of the DQ each day.
Q: One of the interesting findings suggested by your work is that while people
believe they are more creative under deadline pressure, they are not. At the
same time, too little pressure does little to help creativity, either. So how
does a manager find that "sweet spot" along the time/creativity continuum?
A: Actually, I don't think it's a continuum, but rather a set of conditions
that seem to determine whether time pressure will have positive or negative
effects on creativity.
I don't think there's much danger of too little time pressure in most
organizations I've studied
Teresa AmabileAs the HBR article points out, the results suggest that,
overall, very high levels of time pressure should be avoided if you want to
foster creativity on a consistent basis. However, if a time crunch is
absolutely unavoidable, managers can try to preserve creativity by protecting
people from fragmentation of their work and distractions; they should also give
people a sense of being "on a mission," doing something difficult but
important. I don't think, though, that most people can function effectively in
that mode for long periods of time without getting burned out.
At the other end of the spectrum, very low time pressure might lull people into
inaction; under those conditions, top-management encouragement to be creative
to do something radically new might stimulate creativity. But, frankly, I don't
think there's much danger of too little time pressure in most organizations
I've studied.
Q: What are the implications of your research so far for business leaders who
want to enhance creativity in their organizations?
A: My answer to the previous question suggests managerial implications
concerning time pressure. More broadly, our research suggests that managers
should try to avoid or reduce the "obstacles to creativity" (time pressure and
organizational impediments like political problems, harsh criticism of new
ideas, and emphasis on the status quo) and enhance the "stimulants to
creativity" (freedom, positive challenge in the work); sufficient resources
(work-group supports, putting together diversely skilled teams that communicate
well, are mutually committed to the work, and constructively discuss ideas);
supervisory encouragement (team leaders who communicate effectively with the
group, value individual contributions, protect the group within the
organization, set clear goals while allowing freedom in meeting the goals, and
serve as good work models); and organizational encouragement (like
conversations about ideas across the organization, and a top management focus
on rewarding and recognizing good creative work).
Q: Personally, what has been your most surprising finding or findings?
A: Perhaps the most surprising finding from the time pressure study is that
time pressure really does seem to have an important impact on creativity, even
though our intuitions are contradictory and previous research is inconclusive.
I'm also very surprised that, while our participants were giving evidence of
less creative thinking on time-pressured days, they reported feeling more
creative on those days. This helps me gain a bit of insight into those
contradictory intuitions!
Q: Although you are attempting to understand the "black box" of creativity in
an organizational setting, have you talked to or researched creative folks in
the arts or other endeavors?
A: Several years ago, while a professor of psychology at Brandeis University, I
studied professional artists who occasionally did commissioned work. They
seemed to be the perfect population for me to study the effect of
contracted-for reward on creativity; they received contracts specifying their
monetary "reward" up front for some of their work, but did other work
completely self-initiated, with uncertainty about whether they'd ever sell the
work. I found that, overall, their commissioned artworks were rated by expert
judges as significantly less creative than their non-commissioned
self-initiated work. The judges didn't know which works were commissioned, and
they weren't familiar with any of the artists' work previously. This wasn't
true for all of the artists, but it was true for most.
Also while at Brandeis, I did a laboratory experiment with creative writers
people who spent a significant part of their time each week writing fiction,
poetry, or drama. I wanted to see if their creativity would be temporarily
affected by having them focus on extrinsic motivations for being a writer, such
as getting rich and famous, versus intrinsic motivations such as enjoying the
process of writing. After getting them to think about one or the other set of
motives (or no motives for writing, in a control condition), I had them each
write a brief poem that was later judged by experts who were also blind to the
experimental conditions. I found that the creativity of the poems was
significantly lower in the extrinsic motivation condition than in the other
conditions. This supported one of the main findings of my entire research
program on creativity: The Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity. People
will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest,
enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself, and not by external
pressures or inducements.
Q: Are you under time pressure yourself to wrap this project up? When will the
work be complete?
A: The time pressure study is one of several projects coming out of a
longitudinal research program that my team and I have been working on since
1996. These projects are all aimed at discovering how specific events and
patterns of events within organizations can influence the work environment,
motivation, perceptions, creativity, and other aspects of performance. In the
process, we are discovering a great deal about what really happens at work and
what managers can do to make it better. We hope to wrap up most of the analyses
and the writing up of results in the next three to four years.
It's hard to imagine being able to carry out a ten-year organizational research
program of such magnitude 12,000 DQs from so many employees in so many
companies at any academic institution besides HBS!
See Related Articles
How To Develop More Creative Thinking
Are you a procrastinator? In the end, that habit could hinder your job
performance. Teresa Amabile discusses ways to think more creatively.
I'd advise people not to kid themselves into thinking that they'll stimulate
their creativity by avoiding working on a complex problem until the last
minute. It's probably best to get started as soon as possible, laying out the
problem in all its complexity and mapping out some strategies for tackling it.
After spending significant time working hard on the problem, it's often useful
to set the problem aside, work on something else for a few days or even longer,
if possible, and allow the original ideas and problems to "incubate." Often,
solutions or ideas will pop up during the incubation period seemingly without
effort although, of course, a great deal of effort has already gone into the
problem.
Obviously, if you cut things too close in budgeting your time, you won't have
that luxury of incubation or of that important preparatory work up front. The
final working out of a solution and implementing the solution probably won't
suffer as much under time pressure as the initial generation of ideas.
If high time pressure is unavoidable on a project that requires creativity, you
can try to protect yourself from that fragmentation and distraction I mentioned
earlier. You can also try to acquaint yourself with the need for urgency in the
project helping yourself to get motivated by the urgency and accept the
"mission."
Teresa Amabile is the Edsel Bryant Ford Professor of Business Administration
and head of the Entrepreneurship and Service Management Unit at Harvard
Business School.
Collaborators with Teresa Amabile on the time pressure research are:
Lee Fleming, HBS
Constance Hadley, HBS
Steven Kramer, Independent researcher
Jennifer Mueller, Yale School of Management
William Simpson, HBS