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The influence of breadth functional experience on employee creative performance
Master thesis - MSc Human Resource Management University of Groningen, Faculty of Economics and Business
June 5, 2016
R.C. van der Vegte Studentnumber: 1992465
Nassaulaan 12a 9717 CJ Groningen Tel: +31631044466
Email: r.c.van.der.vegte@student.rug.nl
Supervisor/university T. Vriend
Supervisor/field of study Y. Shao
Department of HRM and organizational behavior
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ABSTRACT
This research investigates the effects of breadth of functional experiences on the employee creative performance. Suspected is that workload will be a moderator in this relationship. We test our hypotheses through a large quantitative survey study with paired data from supervisors and subordinates. Specifically, subordinates indicated their amount of relevant functional experience from the past and evaluated the workload they experienced during their jobs. Leaders rated their subordinates on creativity. Within this research, we found that the breadth functional experience of employees did influence the creativity someone displayed during his/her job.
People with a broad experience in different kind of jobs were more creative during their current work. We also tested if the amount of workload is a moderator in this relationship. However, we failed to confirm this second hypothesis. Implications and limitations were further discussed.
Keywords: creativity, breadth of functional experience, workload
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, creativity and innovation are critical to success across a variety of organizational domains (Amabile, 1996). Market-leading companies need to be creative to ensure continuous increasing revenues (Elliot & Nakata. 2013). In the current world economy, companies are rapidly expanding their business activities to other parts of the world. By doing this, they will face new problems which cannot be solved in old-fashioned ways. The people who will face these problems need to have more expertise in order to handle these situations (Li & Zhang, 2007). Given the importance of creativity, how to boost individual creativity still remains salient for both scholars and managers.
One key factor that has been shown relevant for boosting individual creativity is multiple experiences or competences that people developed during their work and life (Leung, Maddux, Galinsky, & Chiu, 2008). However, previous research on multiple experiences or competences mainly focuses on experiences that are gained through living or working cross- culturally(Godart, Maddux, Shiplov & Gadinsky 2015), little attention has been paid to examine
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whether and when the multiple experiences that individuals have gained within cultures by working cross-functionally are related to individual creativity. As nowadays people experience increased job mobility and therefore switch jobs more often (Seongsoo, 2016). It becomes necessary to examine the relationship as it will provide insights on whether managers should recruit employees with high breadth of functional experience if they have higher creativity requirements for the job.
This paper suggests that breadth functional experience is positively linked to individual creativity. We propose that the extent to which members have accumulated work experiences across different functional domains relevant for the organization (i.e., breadth of functional experience; Bunderson, 2003) can increase individuals’ ability to view situations from different perspectives, which further benefits creativity (Ritchie & Eastwood, 2006).
Besides the main relationship, we expect that workload will be a moderator in this relationship. When workload is high, individuals are not able to effectively access their rich functional experience (González-Muñoz & Gutiérrez-Martínez, 2007). Eventually, the benefits of breadth of functional experience on creativity would disappear, since some employees have weaker feelings of involvement when they feel higher amounts of workload (Wicker & August, 1995). Weaker involvement leads to decreased access to their cognitive functioning and therefore worse access to the effect of previous work experience. (Elsbach and Hargadon.
2006).
Although previous research has investigated the relation between having foreign experience and the amount of creativity a person possesses (Godart et al. 2015), our study makes additional contribution beyond previous research in terms of getting a better understanding of the role of functional experiences in creativity. Using the results of this research, we can provide practical implications for companies whether it is useful to recruit employees with broad functional experience and whether switching job across functions is a good strategy for enhancing individual creativity. Besides, by investigating the moderating role of workload, we can get better understanding when functional experience can be a potential predictor of individual creativity and managers can change their practice to facilitate individual creativity development.
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THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Breadth of the functional experience
We would first like to discuss the different variables used in this research paper. Within this research we will define the breadth of functional experience as the extent to which members have accumulated work experiences across different functional domains relevant for the organization (Bunderson, 2003). When breadth of the functional experience is high, according to Kelly (1955), the employees are able to use their cognitive structures (e.g. personal constructs) to understand their environment. The cognitive structures are theories (often stereotypes) about situations in order to predict certain outcomes. According to the personal construct theory, personal constructs consist of prior experiences in other subjects of labor which will help people to develop a more cognitive subsystem to interpret social environments (de Vries, Walter & van der Vegt, 2014). When applied to breadth of functional experience, we suspect that this will also influence the creativity of employees. When the functional experience of an employee is higher, he/she will be able to use more different cognitive structures to deal with the problems he is facing, which will trigger individuals to more original ideas (Fournier
& Payne, 1994; Fournier, 1996)
Employee creative performance
Despite lots of research, creativity still is an ill-defined concept. There isn’t really one definition which covers the whole subject of ‘creativity’. As Jones, Rodgers and Nicholl (2013:6) assert: ‘Despite the enormous amounts of research to understand better and support creativity in design (...) it is still difficult to locate any common agreement among researchers on operational definitions of what it means for a designed product, space, experience, service, or system to be ‘creative’.
In this paper, creativity is defined as ideas generated by employees that are characterized as novel and useful (Zhou & Shalley, 2003). In the today’s environment, companies lay a large emphasis on creative capabilities of employees (Lewis & Elaver, 2014). Literature has shown that creativity is often the predictor of high performance and job satisfaction (Marques Santos, Uitdewilligen, & Passos, 2015). Therefore studying creativity is very relevant for today’s organizations aiming to stay competitive (Marques et al, 2015).
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The relationship between functional experience and creativity
We propose that employees will be more creative when they have a high level of functional experience in different relevant work areas. When people have experience in different kind of work functions, they learn to look at situations from multiple perspectives (Ritchie & Eastwood, 2006) and when people look at situations from different kind of perspectives, they could come up with different approaches to solve a single problem (Lewis &
Elaver, 2014), which in turn boosts creative solutions. People with a breadth functional experience will be exposed to a variety of inputs to the creative process (Godart et al. 2015).
Some group creativity research provides indirect support for the potential benefits of multiple perspectives on creativity. For instance, a couple of researches suggests that to enhance group creativity, organizations should promote employees to consider different viewpoints. These employees could contribute with multiple and non-overlapping information, perspectives and expertise to stimulate creativity (Bell, Villado, Lukasik, Belau, & Briggs, 2011; Randel &
Jaussi, 2003). If an employee experiences a problem, he or she could use expertise from previous jobs and situations to create a new solution to this problem (Ritchie & Eastwood, 2006). They will therefore be more creative in a sense that they do not use only limited ways to solve problems. These employees will use the results of their own (more) advanced cognitive process (Rhodes, 1961). Employees who are low in breadth functional experience will be less able to use solutions which worked in the past, because of the fact that they lack the functional experience.
In a research of Godart and colleagues (2015), it has already shown that foreign experience will influence the amount of creativity employees have. This due to the fact that employees who have foreign experience might see the world in another perspective and face different new situations during their stay in another culture. It has already shown that for example first- or second-generation immigrants are more creative compared to individuals raised in a single country (Lambert, Tucker, & d’Anglejan, 1973; Simonton, 1994, 1997, 1999).
This could help them when they need to be more creative during their day-to-day jobs (Godart et al. 2015). We propose that the similar logic can be applied to domestic experience in different relevant functional areas. We argue that broad functional experience can stimulates individuals’
ability to view a problem from a different viewpoint, which in turn benefits creativity. We therefore state hypothesis 1 as:
Hypothesis 1: The breadth of the functional experience of an employee is positively related to employee creative performance.
6 The moderating role of Workload
Besides the main relation between the breadth of the functional experience and the employee creative performance, we suspect that workload will be a moderator on this relationship. In literature, workload is defined as a rather vague concept. This research uses the definition of Bruggen (2015) to characterize workload. Bruggen defines it as ‘being very busy’
without a reference to a specific target or goal. The effort in this concept is more important than the final performance. Someone could experience a high amount of workload without having a high performance at the same time. High workload would damage individuals’ cognitive functioning and decrease individual’s cognitive control resources (Elsbach and Hargadon.
2006). People need cognitive breaks in order to feel a sense of predictability and control during their work and provides them with the needed cognitive capacity (Elsbach and Hargadon, 2006). Under high workload situation, the breadth of functional experience maybe cannot be transferred to creativity because the lack of cognitive control resources and damaged cognitive functioning, which are necessary for people to search, retrieve and organize information in their cognition structure. This is called cognitive entrenchment, and it leads to cognitive fixedness (Dane, 2010). We suspect that workload therefore will be a moderator in our conceptual model.
When the workload of an employee is too high, this person would be damaged in their cognitive functioning (Elsbach and Hargadon, 2006). We suspect that the potential benefits cannot be transferred to creativity (Baer & Oldham, 2006) due to the fact that people are not able to effectively retrieve and organize information that are gained through breadth of functional experience. We thus suggest a negative interaction effect between the workload someone experiences and breadth of the functional experience on employee creative performance.
Third, we suspect that a high workload would disrupt organizational identification (de Vries et al. 2012). This organizational identification is the belongingness to the organization and it serves as a key contingency factor that influences team members’ motivation to utilize to use their cognitive complexity for or against interteam coordination (de Vries et al. 2012). It therefore shapes the indirect linkage between breadth of functional experience and individuals’
behavior (de Vries et al. 2012). Concluding all these arguments, our second hypothesis therefore will be:
Hypothesis 2: The amount of workload someone experiences works as a moderator in the relationship between breadth functional experience and employee creative performance. The relationship is stronger when workload is low instead of high.
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To get a clear image of all the hypotheses we will do research on within this study, we now visualize them in a conceptual model. This model can be found below in figure 1. Hypothesis 1 is the main relation between breadth of functional experience and creative performance of an employee and workload will be suspected to be our moderator on this main relationship
(hypothesis 2). .
Figure 1 – The conceptual model
METHOD Participants and Procedure
We now explain the methods used to perform this research. About 544 people participated in this study and received no offer in return for their participation. Participants were found in different companies within Europe and did not have specific functional backgrounds.
Potential respondents were being contacted via email, phone or face-to-face contact. Leaders filled in the leader version of questionnaire in which they were asked to rate subordinates’
creativity. Subordinates filled in the subordinate version of questionnaire in which they indicate their functional experience. Responses from subordinates and corresponding leaders were paired, which resulted in 389 paired data points. The research context of this study has been the company’s setting or a private setting, depending on the place they chose to fill in the questionnaire. Participants were being requested to give their personal level of agreement or disagreement with the statements by responding to them on a 7-point Likert scale, with 1 indicating ‘totally disagree’ and 7 indicating ‘totally agree’. The questions were stated in Dutch, German, Bulgarian or English and were translated afterwards in order to increase the participation ratio of the respondents. A double-blind back-translation was used to translate the questions from English to other languages. To protect confidentiality, all answers were anonymous. The estimated time of the employee questionnaire was about 20 minutes. The estimated time of the leader questionnaire depended on the size of the corresponding team.
Workload -
Breadth of functional experience Creative performance
+
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For this research, a total number of 107 leaders was approached to participate in this study. This results in a total of 87 valid responses (81.31% response rate) and 389 employee responses (62.74% response rate). This data resulted in a 389 paired employee-supervisor sets.
The employee data consisted of a total of 182 males (46.8%) and 186 female respondents (47.8%). 5.4% consists of missing data. The total dataset with leader information of leaders who responded to our research consisted of 56 males (64.4%) and 31 female leaders (35.6%).
On average, employee respondents were 38 years old and leader respondents did had an average age of 43 years. The range of respondents was between 17 and 64 years old.
The average educational level was relatively high and ranged from primary school to a doctors degree. The mean tenure of employees was 9 years and 8 months, while leaders had an average tenure of 12 years and 8 months.
While measuring the breadth functional experience of respondents, we discovered 162 respondents had experience in sales or marketing functions, 100 respondents had experience in manufacturing functions, 87 respondents had job experience in finance or accounting functions, 74 respondents had experience in personnel or HR functions, 101 respondents had job experience in distribution or warehouse functions, 47 respondents had experience in R&D, 99 respondents had experience in technical support functions, 153 respondents had experience in administrative support functions, 79 respondents had experience in general management functions, 65 respondents had experience in health care functions, 57 respondents indicated to have experience in civil service functions and 69 respondents indicated to have experience in other functions. Concluding: most people in the respondent dataset had experience in administrative functions.
MEASUREMENTS Breadth of the functional experience
Consistent with previous research (de Vries et al. 2014), we asked participating employees to indicate the amount of years of work experience in diverse relevant jobs. There was a total of 11 functional domains and a final option which indicated ‘other (please specify)’.
All these 12 domains will cover the most important functional areas, according to experts. On this basis, we calculated each person’s breadth of functional experience, using Bunderson’s (2003) version of Blau’s (1977) heterogeneity index:
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Where Pi is the percentage of total years of work experience in the ith functional domain and k represents the total number of functional domains (k = 12 in this research). This resulted in an overall score ranging from 0 (i.e., all work experience gathered in a single functional domain) to a theoretical maximum of .91 (i.e., total work experience evenly distributed across all 12 domains). For each respondent who indicated that they were a subordinate, one question was dedicated to find out his/her breadth of the functional experience, in which the respondent indicated her personal work experience.
Employee creativity
Consisted with previous research of Sacramento, Fay & West (2013), we asked participants to indicate the amount of creativity their subordinates did express during their daily tasks. Because the original 7 items mainly focus on originality of creativity (with 5 items about originality, 1 item about the feasibility and 1 item about overall creativity), we added 8 items to cover also the feasibility of creativity and overall creativity. The creativity variable resulted in a Cronbach’s Alpha of .97, and was therefore very reliable. Examples of questions asked were: ‘at work, person X suggested many ideas.’ and ‘at work, person X suggested ideas that take various constraints (e.g., time, resources) into consideration.’’
Workload
In order to measure the amount of workload someone experiences, we used questions consisting with previous research from Bakker, Demerouti and Verbeke (2004) and Molino, Cortese, Bakker & Ghislieri (2015). This in order to measure the amount of workload employees’ experience. Questions were asked to the subordinate. A total of 4 questions was asked about workload to each participant in this study. The workload variable resulted in a Cronbach’s Alpha of .85, and was therefore very reliable. An example of a question is: ‘How often do you have to work extra hard in order to reach a deadline?’
Control variables.
In this study we used gender and age as the control variables. We suspect that gender could make a difference in the creative of employees by their leaders, since we suspect that
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male persons would be rated as more creative than female persons. It has already been shown that masculine behavior influence the perception of someone’s creativity (Proudfoot, Kay, Koval, 2015). Therefore, we suspect that male participants do have more positive creativity above female participants.
We also included age as a control variable. Within research, there are a lot of different opinions about the relationship between age and creativity. Taylor (1969) clearly states that creativity does not disappear over the years. In contrary, he states that ‘the men’s mental gear does not go into reverse when he reaches intellectual maturity. Rather, his capacity to think, learn and innovate continues to grow well past middle age (Taylor, 1969)’. Other researchers, like Ekelund, Jackson & Tollison (2015) say that there is a peak value of creativity during a younger age. We assume that older people automatically have a more breadth functional experiences in their jobs. Older people mostly have more work experience and therefore the chance of having several jobs instead of one is higher. However, we are not sure about this relation. Recently, the new generation of employees shows a trend of switching jobs more often (Seongsoo, 2016). In the old days, people were not expected to switch jobs. This could influence this variable. How strong this influence is on the control variable of age is not yet known.
RESULTS Descriptive statistics
The descriptive statistics were examined before starting to do the analysis. Outliers were deleted, and the mean and standard deviation are shown in table 1. We deleted outliers based on the creativity scores employees perceived. A one-way ANOVA was used to compare the means of years of work experience to the creativity rating. After people indicated to have 47 or more years of experience in different kind of functional areas, creativity ratings were resulting very inconsistent and were therefore unreliable. All scores above 47 years of work experience in different kind of functional areas were marked as outliers. After deleting outliers, a total number of 303 (n = 303) respondents was left.
In table 1, the correlation analysis shows both means and standard deviations of all variables included in this analysis. For breadth of functional experience, we will use a score between 0 (only have performed work in one functional area) and 0.91 (the respondent has performed work in 12 different functional areas), according to Bunderson’s (2003) version of Blau’s (1977) heterogeneity index mentioned in the measurement part.
The correlations between the dependent variable (creativity), the independent variable (breadth of functional experience), the moderator (workload) and both control variables (age
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and gender) were analyzed. We found no significant correlation between breadth of functional experience and workload (r =.02, p >.05) and no significant correlation between workload and creativity (r =.03, p >.05). There was however, a marginally significant correlation between the breadth of functional experience and creativity (r =.10 p <.10).
When we look at the control variables, both were significantly correlated with the creativity someone displays during their daily jobs. However the correlation coefficient was relatively weak. Age had a correlation of .14 (p <.01) and gender has a correlation of -.17(p
<.01) on creativity. Both control variables were significant on a 1% significance level.
Hypothesis testing
In order to test our hypothesis, we first wanted to know if the leader would influence the creativity rating of his team. Some leaders naturally give high scores for their team members, despite their lack of creativity. Therefore we first used a one-way ANOVA in order to see if there is a difference between teams. The one-way ANOVA test resulted in the following score:
(F(86,302)=2508, p <.01). Because it is significant, it confirms that there is a large variation between groups. A group membership does matter for the creativity scores people get. So some teams are rated creative, while in practice, they do not show more creativity. The leader only rated the team more or less creative than other leaders. With this results and the results from One-way ANOVA, you can draw the conclusion that it is necessary to use Hierarchical Multilevel Analysis to test our hypothesis.
Secondly, to calculate the influence of a team membership, we used Hierarchical Multilevel to draw a second conclusion about the influence of specific leaders in their creativity
TABLE 1: Correlations
Variable N Mean SD 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
1. Workload 368 4.93 1.09 (.85)
2. Breadth of functional experience
368 .34 .27 .02 --
3. Creativity 303 4.82 1.17 .03 .10† (.97)
4. Age Employee 368 38.28 11.31 .06 -.18** .14** --
5. Gender Employee 360 1.51 .50 -.06 -.08 -.17** -.09† --
Note: N ranges from 303 to 368 due to missing data.
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
† Correlation is marginally significant at the 0.10 level (2-tailed)
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ratings. The results out of this test are shown in table 2. Due to the fact that the intercept is significant (p = .00), which suggests there are large portion of variation of creativity is accounted by team level factors. The variation of the relationship will be calculated by the dividing the intercept value by the residual value (.34/1.02=.35). This means that 35% of the variation can be explained by the type of team a team member belongs to. Therefore we again can confirm the conclusion that a specific team membership influences the creativity scores obtained by the leader.
TABLE 2: Covariance parameters
Parameter Estimate Standard error Significance
Residual 1.02 .08 .00**
Intercept .34 .09 .00**
† = p < .10; * = p < .05; ** = p < .01
Third, we computed the hierarchical multilevel analysis. We first tested the influence of the control variables on creativity. When we look at the results, we concluded that in model 1, age had a very significant correlation with creativity, however the relationship is weak (B = -.02, p <.01). Gender had a rather high influence on creativity, however it was only marginally significant (B = -.23, p <.10).
In the second model, we added our independent variables. When these variables are added, we concluded that workload had a marginally significant relationship with creativity (B = -.02, p <.10). Breadth of functional experience was also marginally significant (p < 0.10) but also had a strong correlation with creativity (B = .45). When our independent variables are added to the analysis, gender seemed not to be significant anymore.
In the third model, we added the interaction effect to our hierarchical multilevel analysis.
The results are shown in table 3. Concluded can be that workload does not give a significant relationship anymore, while the influence of breadth of functional experience on creativity only gets stronger (B = .47, p < .05).
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Although the influence of the moderator has not been significant according to the hierarchical multilevel analysis, we would like to visualize the B-coefficient in a visual graph.
This because the relationship is almost marginally significant and we will further elaborate on the influence of the moderator in the procedure developed by Hayes (2012). The interaction effect between workload and breadth of functional experience was visualized in figure 2. In this figure, breadth of functional experience influenced creativity in a more positive way when workload was high instead of low.
TABLE 3: Hierarchical Multilevel Analysis for Task Performance CREATIVITY
Predictor MODEL 1 MODEL 2 MODEL 3
Control variables
Age -.02** -.01† -.01†
Gender .23† .20 .21
Independent variable Workload
Breadth of functional experience
-.02†
.45†
-.01 .47*
Interaction terms
Breadth of functional experience * Workload .33
X2 1120.51 914.93 918.13
† = p < .10; * = p < .05; ** = p < .01 Note: Variables have been mean centered.
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Figure 2: The interaction effect between breadth of functional experience and workload on creativity
Hayes processing analysis
Following the hierarchical multilevel analysis, we conducted process procedure developed by Hayes (2012) to test hypothesis 1 and hypothesis 2. The results of the analysis are shown in table 4. Table 4 shows an R-value of .22 (p =.01), which means that the variance has been explained by included variables. The P-value is significant if we use a 5% significance level.
TABLE 4 Hayes processing analysis
R R-square MSE F Df1 Df2 p
.22 .05 1.20 3.01 5 290 .01
B Se T P LLCI ULCI
Constant 4.82 .31 15.50 .00 4.21 5.43
Centralized Workload -.03 .06 -.44 .66 -.14 .09
Centralized Br. Of functional Experience.
.05 .24 2.03 .04 .01 .96
Interaction effect .38 .22 1.72 .09 -.06 .82
Employee age -.01 .01 -1.86 .06 -.02 .00
Employee Gender .31 .13 2.36 .02 .05 .57
All independent variables in this table were centralized
1 1,5 2 2,5 3 3,5 4 4,5 5
Low Breadth of functional experience
High Breadth of functional experience
Creativity Low Workload
High Workload
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After doing the procedure developed by Hayes (2012), breadth of functional experience does has a significant effect (p = .04) on the creativity someone displays, however this effect is not very large (B = .05). Centralized workload does not have a significant relation (p = .66 to creativity (B = -.03). All independent variables are centralized in this analysis.
When we look at the control variables, employee gender can be confirmed to have a significant effect on creativity (p = .02) on a 5% significance level. Concluding this, women tend to be perceived as more creative than men. Employee age is marginally significant (p = .06) with a B-value of -.01. This means there is only a weak effect between age and creativity.
The conditional effect of breadth functional experience on creativity was stated in table 5. The results suggested that the relationship between breadth of functional experience and creativity is generally stimulated by workload, especially when this workload is perceived as high (p = .01). When the workload someone perceived is low, there is no clear significant effect on the creativity (p = .86)
TABLE 5 Conditional effect of X on Y at the values of the moderator ‘workload’
Centralized Workload Effect se t p LLCI ULCI
-1.1105 .06 .34 .17 .86 -.61 .73
-.0168 .48 .24 2.00 .05* .01 .95
1.0769 .89 .34 2.64 .01** .23 1.56
* = p < .05; ** = p < .01
DISCUSSION
In this research, we investigated the relationship between breadth functional experience and creativity. We suspected that people with a broad functional experience could look at situations from different angles and therefore be more creative in finding new solutions. When people had a breadth functional experience, they would be able to better use their cognitive structures (e.g.
personal constructs) to understand their environment Kelly (1955). When people would have experience in different kind of work functions, they could learn to look at situations from multiple perspectives (Ritchie & Eastwood, 2006) and when people look at situations from different kind of perspectives, they could come up with different approaches to solve a single problem (Lewis & Elaver, 2014), which in turn boosts the development of creative solutions.
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Within this relationship, we suspected workload to be a moderator. We beforehand thought that high workload would damage individuals’ cognitive functioning and decrease individual’s cognitive control resources (Elsbach and Hargadon. 2006). In our opinion, we thought that people needed cognitive breaks in order to feel a sense of predictability and control during their work and provided them with the needed cognitive capacity (Elsbach and Hargadon, 2006). Under high workload situation, the breadth of functional experience would not be transferred to creativity because a lack of cognitive control resources and damaged cognitive functioning, which are necessary for people to search, retrieve and organize information in their cognition structure. Someone’s attention would be distracted to their daily tasks and due to the high amount of work pressure, we suspected these people to take the first acceptable solution instead of making up a broad analysis with different kinds of solutions.
The main effect of breadth functional experience on creativity
After doing the hierarchical multilevel analysis, we found a significant relationship between a breadth functional experience and the amount of creativity. Like Godart et al. (2015), a broad experience of an employee stimulated their creativity. The difference, however, between both researches is that Godart et al.(2015) uses foreign experiences gained by working abroad and that we used domestic gained experiences for our research. Research performed by Godart et al (2015) has found that in order to stimulate creativity, one needs to have a variety of inputs. ‘These deeper experiences provide the critical opportunity for psychological transformation to make sense of these diverse inputs, as well as the ability to embed oneself in professional networks to produce creative innovations’(Godart et al, 2015:213). In this research, we were able to prove that a breadth functional experience influenced the creativity, proven on a 5% significance level. This meant that more divers experiences stimulate the creative thinking process. People who will have experience in different kind of work environments will be more creative due to the fact that they are able to look at situation in different kind of views. If people do have experience in multiple working areas, they will be able to use multiple views on how to deal with certain problems. In current research(van Knippenberg et al., 2004; van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) and meta-analysis(Hulsheger et al., 2009; van Dijk et al., 2012), it has more often been found that a breadth functional experience only has impact on creativity if certain conditions are met. For example, Baer and Oldham (2006) state that creative time pressure could influence the effect of a breadth functional experience. Other factors which could influence the relationship between a diverse experience and creativity is members’ openness to experience. Research already has been done
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by Schilpzand, Herold and Shalley (2016) about the relationship between members’ openness to experience and creativity. Due to the fact that members’ openness to experience leads to a more breadth functional experience which eventually leads to a more creative employee, the breadth of functional experience could be a mediator in this relationship. Further research, however, first has to confirm these hypotheses. Also, according to Schilpzand et al (2016:62):
‘Those members high on openness may generate the novelty content of the creative ideas (i.e., divergent thinking), whereas those low on openness will be able to bring the team back to reality by focusing on the appropriateness of the novel ideas (i.e., convergent thinking)’. There could be more factors moderating or mediating the relationship between breadth of functional experience and creativity, which have to be researched in future research. Also, not all types of experience could have a positive effect on the creativity output. It is a combination of specific attributes gained by having multiple experiences which makes a person grown in their creativity performance (Godart et al. 2015)
The moderating effect of workload
During hierarchical multilevel analysis, we found no significant relationship for the moderator (workload). The relationship between the moderator (workload) and the main relationship (breadth functional experience causes more creativity) is .33. This coefficient was close to being marginally significant. Possible is that the need for creativity within the participants’ jobs was not high enough to clearly present the effect of the moderator. As Baer and Oldham (2006:968) state: ‘employees exhibited relatively high creativity when they experienced intermediate creative time pressure’. Due to this fact, the influence of the moderator on the relationship between breadth functional experience on creativity would be disrupted by the fact that the need for creativity was in many cases not high enough. There is a chance that the moderation effect of workload would be more valid if the creativity requirement is higher within the participants’ jobs.
When using the procedure analysis developed by Hayes (2012), we can state that the influence of workload would be large when workload is high. This indicates that, also according to the findings of Bruggen (2015), the quality of creativity displayed by the employee does not decline when the quantity of work increases. In cases of low workload, people would not be interested to seek for creative solutions due to the fact that they do not see the value of the work (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006). This relationship however has not been significantly proven in the hierarchical multilevel analysis. Therefore, there is no proven effect of the moderator on the relationship between breadth of functional experience and creativity.
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The second thing what stands out, is that the effect on the relationship between breadth of functional experience and creativity was not negative like we expected, but positive. We suspected that people with high amounts of workload feel more pressure to perform and would therefore try more to access all possible solutions. Workload should not be too high making the employee get a burn-out, but a relatively high amount of workload would stimulate creativity performance (Bruggen, 2015). Previous research about the influence of workload on creativity shows various results. Results of previous research implied evidence of a positive relationship (Kelly & Karau, 1999), a negative relationship (Kelly & McGrath, 1985), a curvilinear relationship indicating an optimal level of moderate time pressure (Isenberg, 1981), and no relationship at all (Bassett, 1979). This moderating effect should therefore be researched further in future attempts. If our sample would be larger, the relationship would become clearer and we would be able to make a better judgment about workload as a potential moderator.
According to the results of this research, we can conclude that the moderating effect of workload has not been significantly proven, and if it would be significant, people do not suffer from higher workload in order to be creative. In contrary, people with relatively high amounts of workload are stimulated to be more creative during their daily jobs.
The control variables age and gender
When looking at the control variables, gender was not significant and age turned out to be marginally significant. Older employees are generally perceived and evaluated as less effective, less creative and less flexible according to literature (Finkelstein et al., 1995; Rosen and Jerdee, 1977). The results of this research state that older people tend to have slightly less creativity than younger people (B = -.01). This could be caused by the fact that age is negatively correlated to creativity if the employee has low job control (Binnewies, Ohly, Niessen, 2008).
Due to the fact that older people are to be seen as less creative, this could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It also could be weaker because of the fact that nowadays, younger people tend to switch jobs more often, and therefore have a larger breadth of functional experience which influences their creativity (Godart et al. 2015). The relationship between age and creativity found in this research is extremely weak. The influence is therefore hard to notice.
Secondly, we found that gender did not significantly influenced the employee creativity according to the hierarchical multilevel analysis. With a correlation of .21, women are more creative than men. The relationship, however is not significant. These results are consistent with current known research. According to Proudfoot et al. (2015), ‘the propensity to think creatively tends to be associated with independence and self-direction, which is often associated with
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men’. This clearly states that men are more creative than woman. Proudfoot et al. (2015) is speaking about a creativity bias. These are factors which are influencing the creativity rating of peers (Proudfoot et al, 2015). The creativity bias makes people believe that overall, men are more creative than woman (Proudfoot et al, 2015). This makes creativity scores unreliable due to the influence of the bias.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
According to the results of this study, a company needs to pay attention to the breadth functional experience new applicants possess. Experience in previous jobs does imply that the person has easier access to creative solutions and he will therefore be more creative during his job.
Companies could implement this information within their recruiting policies. Workload is not a significant moderator in this relationship. The workload someone will experiences during their work does not influences the effect between the breadth of functional experience and the creativity of this person. The relationship is not significant, so future research should be done in order to find other factors influencing this relationship. Concluding we can say that companies do not have to take in account the workload of jobs when there is a high need for creativity in case of the potential employee has a lot of functional experience. The results of this study imply that there is a significant relationship between age and creativity. This would mean that companies should assign tasks with a high need for creativity to relatively younger employees. The relationship however is very weak, so no direct action is required in current workforces in order to boost creativity. Gender did not show significant results on creativity, so when companies are recruiting new employees, there is no need to take gender in account when there is a high creativity requirement for the job. Also, when the overall organization has a high need for creativity due to its company core process or core products, these results could also be implemented in the recruitment policies. The people would be equal qualified for a job, the company could choose for the younger applicant in order to stimulate creativity within the company.
This research paper would be an important contribution to theory, since there has not been much research about these specific variables influencing someone’s creativity. There are numerous studies about creativity and different factors influencing it. However, it remains a relatively vague and unclear subject. This study will contribute to this rapidly growing in interest subject and hopefully will inspire future research. Further research could specifically look into the different kinds of work experience. We now equally valued all different kinds of
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working areas, but there could be a difference between managerial positions and executive positions, or operational positions. Further research should define different kind of working experiences in order to see if combining different kinds of work experience will exponentially boosts the creativity of employees. There was a clear influence between breadth of functional experience and creativity. While workload did not seem to be a clear moderator in this relationship. Further research will be needed in order to clear up this relationship and to try to significantly prove more relationships on creativity.
LIMITATIONS
Within this study, there have been some limitations. One of the first limitations is the language barrier. All questions were stated in 4 different questions, which makes it prone to mistakes. All questions were both translated and back-translated, but still there could be some mistakes in understanding the meaning of some of the questions.
Secondly, the country of origin is a limitation. Western countries we used (Bulgaria, Germany and the Netherlands) as respondents, but a non-western culture could provide us with different findings. We would not suggest to generalize these results to be globally useable.
A third limitation of this study could be the sample size. Although the sample in this research was large, it would be useful to gather in the near future some more data about the relationship between the breadth functional experience and corresponding creativity someone has. In the current sample, we have to drop out a couple of participants because the unreasonable numbers of working experience indicated. Therefore, more data should be gathered.
The fourth limitation of this study could be the set-up of the overall research. The significance of the relationship could in our opinion be further increased by improving the way our questions were stated. In hindsight, we assume that the respondents could be confused by the logic of the questions asked. First, there we some questions which were asked on a 7-point Likert scale. There questions were pretty straight-forward. After those questions, the participant was asked if he could indicate their functional experience by dragging a bar from zero years of experience to a maximum of 50 years of experience for one job. In our believes, some participants interpreted the bar the same as a 7-point Likert scale, indicating a score of 50 years being ‘very well-known with this function’ and a zero with ‘not known with this business sector at all’. There were relatively many people indicating that they had 50 years of work experience in one functional area. Due to this confusing set-up, the data could be less reliable. This could be the reason of the relatively many outliers we found during the conduct of this research.
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A fifth limitation is the creativity requirements within the sample. Mittal and Lochan Dhar (2015) states: ‘today’s organizational leaders are facing the challenge of balancing important aspects such as the need to motivate employees and develop their creative skills so they are able to consistently deliver high quality and timely performance’. If the respondents were performing jobs in which there was no obvious need to be creative, this might influence their creativity and therefore also our results. This research was based on a random sample of different kind of jobs, some of which required a lot of creativity and some only a bit. In a research executed by Jafri, Dem and Choden (2016), the strong moderating effect was proven in the correlation between emotional intelligence and creativity performance. This research has proven that the organizational climate and a proactive personality were strong moderators to influence the eventual creativity performance (Jafri et al. 2016). We suspect that within our research, primarily the proactive personality could be lacking and therefore the employee creativity was not influenced optimally by the breadth of functional experience. Most of the participants within our sample had simple operational jobs.
CONCLUSION
Concluding, according to this study, we found that creativity is stimulated by a breadth functional experience. Creativity might be something which is intrinsic to each person and could only marginally be stimulated by extrinsic factors like breadth of functional experience.
In order to prove this hypothesis, further research needs to be conducted in the future. This research should be focused on other factors influencing the relationship between breadth of functional experience and creativity.
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APPENDIX Regression analysis
In hypothesis 1, we expect that a breadth functional experience will be positively related to employee creativity. This due to the fact that the employee will be able to interpret situations from different kind of viewpoints, if his/her experience is more diverse. In hypothesis 2, the amount of workload someone experiences works as a moderator in the relationship between breadth of functional experience and employee creative performance. To test both hypothesis, we used hierarchical regression, which results in table 100. In the first step, we entered the control variables (age and gender) in our hierarchical regression analysis. In step two, both main effects were entered, which are the breadth of functional experience on creativity and the moderator ‘workload’. Within step 3, we calculated the interaction effect of workload and breadth of functional experience.
As seen in table 100, the control variables did have a significant relationship to employee creativity (R2 = .03, p < .05). When looking at the main effect, the overall main effect added 2% of variance predications to the model predicting creativity (ΔR2 = .02). We were able to distinguish a significant effect of breadth of functional experience on creativity (B=.48, p <
.05). The coefficient between workload and creativity did not showed a direct significant effect (B = -.04, p > .05).
In the third step, the workload someone experiences added another 2% of variance predications to the model predicting creativity (ΔR2 = .02). The coefficient effect of .38 was marginally significant, which means that there was an observable effect between workload and creativity (p < .10).
† = p < .10; * = p < .05; ** = p < .01 Note: Variables have been mean centered.
TABLE 100: hierarchical regression analysis (n = 303)
Variable R2 ΔR2 B
Step 1 (control variables) .03* .03*
Age .01*
Gender .24†
Step 2 (main effect) .04 .02*
Breadth of functional experience Workload
.48*
-.04
Step 3 (interaction effect) .05† .01*
Workload * Breadth of functional experience .38†
