With an ever-growing competitive market, it is more important now than ever to be innovative in your field. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, employees and employers alike are navigating unprecedented new stressors making generating new ideas rather difficult. As an employer it is essential to have employees who enjoy their job, which will help the innovation within the company. In this blog we are going to be exploring the way stress and the COVID-19 pandemic has affected employee creativity both negatively and positively.

Pre-COVID-19 many creative products were built around mending human relations, bringing humans together, unifying humans. For example, most public flights and vehicles had structured chairs that brought individuals close with ease to interact. In a business setting creativity is all about providing actionable and useful ideas that can be successfully implemented (Amabile, 1998). COVID-19 measures led to the closure of lots of businesses, international flights came to a halt; schooling and working were from home. This changed our approaches so that creativity is now has an overall system approach to management to account for contingencies.

This worldwide pandemic has forced many people to change work environments and habits. Going from an in-person workplace to a digital one was shocking and disruptive to many affecting productivity and motivation levels. Being suddenly thrusted into a digital workspace has the possibility of increased anxiety and decreased motivation, but it also has positive outcomes – increased creativity levels being one of them. Many people do thrive when working with others, however, according to a recent study exposing participants to too many ideas reduces the creativity of the ideas generated (Hofstetter et al., 2021). This means that while good ideas can be generated with peers, the work often is not as unique or beneficial as it would be if someone were to work alone. Competition plays a major role in this, as employees are constantly trying to come up with the best ideas to impress their boss with. Typically, people are afraid of failure and going too far with ideas, so there is an attempt to blend in more with peers. With no one physically there to be compared with, the baseline for ideas is blurred and employees are more likely to take more risks. This results in the boldest and most successful suggestions. Although working online is beneficial to creativity, there can be new issues brought up such as employee anxiety.

The subsequent changes in the working environment for employees has caused an uptick in stress and anxiety. It is easy to assume that job-related anxiety only causes problems for employees, making it harder to focus on tasks or even affecting their behavior in group settings. However, intermediate levels of team job-related anxiety foster more individual employee creativity in teams with high cooperativeness (Mao et al., 2021). The relationship between job-related anxiety and employee creativity has an inverted U-shape (Mao et al., 2021) -where once the optimal level of anxiety has been passed, employees decrease in their creativity. The decrease in creativity also connects to a decrease in team cooperativeness. What does this mean in relation with COVID-19? If employers can adequately give employees structure and adjust to the new work from home setting, it could greatly reduce the spike in stress related to said new changes to maintain an optimal level of anxiety to keep employees cooperative with each other and produce more creative materials. Each job type varies in the base level anxiety and stress connected with them, but it is undeniable that the pandemic has exacerbated that. Remedying and finding the optimal level of anxiety for a corporation ultimately falls into the hands of leaders, and the appropriate style used is indicative to success. In a time of isolation and uncertainty like COVID-19, the increased stress and anxiety can make it tough for employees to feel motivated, optimistic, or creative. Engagement is one of the most important aspects of employees’ work experience, so how can creativity be promoted in a time when stress is high and engagement is hard to find in a virtual teamwork setting like Zoom? One solution might be the shift away from a single leader and toward a bottom-up version of leadership, Shared leadership is likely to enable team members to gain diverse experience in accomplishing tasks and resolving problems through their mutual influences, enhancing their confidence (Hao & Long 2019). With group leadership comes the freedom to be innovative; workers are no longer drones hoping to accomplish the goal of the person who signs their checks but rather they are invested in their own ideas and pushed to go above and beyond to find solutions. What was once stressful work becomes a little less anxiety inducing as each team member not only shoulders a part of the burden, but also works with their teammates to help accomplish the task at hand. In the time of a global pandemic, more meetings are virtual, there are less handshakes and more distractions. It is stressful and challenging to follow a single leader through a screen, but when everyone has a piece of leadership towards a common goal, creativity can flourish as seen with Shared leadership as it is more likely to enhance team creativity because of its bottom‐up implications for cultivating more creative individuals (Hao & Long 2019).

With all the negativity and frustration that comes with COVID-19, there must be a way to direct that energy to create something positive. The negative impact of negative drive is often overlooked and underestimated but in times like today these skills are critical, especially when leading or working with a team. Shifting the focus and attention while in a management position does not go unnoticed by peers. To promote creativity, managers must practice mindfulness. The pandemic has affected everyone in many ways, so it is vital to have the ability to turn a negative situation into something positive. In a leadership role specifically, adapting to all the changes this year is unique, but the way a leader handles each situation will showcase management skills. Including positive interventions (such as mindfulness) can improve self-focused attention in daily life, especially reflective thinking (Ying et al. 2020) It is important to also put personal well-being into perspective, because taking care of yourself will ultimately show through at work and display through creativity as well.

In brief, leaders must find a way to mitigate stress and new changes during the pandemic so that their employees can remain cooperative and creative. To nurture creativity within employees and teams, managers must start by using the new stressor to their advantage, readjusting their scope of focus, and reevaluating their own attitude and leadership style to the new climate. The manager’s role in creating a positive workplace environment for their employees has not decreased just because it is not the same physical space, now more than ever they have a responsibility to convey a positive attitude and be a leader. To not change and adapt managerial and organizational behaviors during COVID-19 is an oversight that has damaging consequences and employees face the brunt of it, making it imperative for managers to adjust and implement these changes to keep their workforce at their prime.

– Simone Lake, Isaiah Mass, Nizala Mwamba-Smith, Julia Olson, Karen Perez

References

Amabile, T.M. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review, 76(5), 77+ https://hbr.org/1998/09/how-to-kill-creativity

Hofstetter, R., Dahl, D. W., Aryobsei, S., & Herrmann, A. (2021). Constraining Ideas: How Seeing Ideas of Others Harms Creativity in Open Innovation. Journal of Marketing Research, 58(1), 95–114. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243720964429

Mao, J, Chang, S, Gong, Y, Xie, JL. Team job‐related anxiety and creativity: Investigating team‐level and cross‐level moderated curvilinear relationships. J Organ Behav. 2021; 42: 34– 47. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2489 Wei, H, Hao, P, Huang L. Long Different roles of shared and vertical leadership in promoting team creativity: Cultivating and synthesizing team members’ individual creativity. J Organ Behav. 2021. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/peps.12321

Ying, D., Yang, Y., Xie, C., Wang, X., Liu, C., Hu, W., & Li, Y. (2020). A positive role of negative mood on creativity: the opportunity in the crisis of the COVID-19 epidemic. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 3853. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.600837