Organizational creativity and psychological well-being - contextual aspects on organizational creativity and psychological well-being from an open systems perspective

Abstract: Organizational creativity and psychological well-being. Present day organizations in a globalized society are experiencing external challenges and changes more than ever before and in order to adapt and react to these changes creativity and innovation are seen as some of the most important means. The standpoint in this thesis is that all employees have creative potential, and how the creative potential is expressed may depend on variables in the organizational context. Accordingly, this thesis aims to investigate the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation and contextual aspects: organizational climate, team climate, leadership, work resources, workload, the organizational culture, and the individual. In this time of change, globalization, and technology improvements to mention some few factors, the well-being of the employees may be at risk. In this thesis it is suggested that increasing organizational creativity and innovation, for which the foundation is employee creativity, are means to achieve a psychological well-being. The results of study I showed that the joint contribution of the contextual variables was related to ratings of organizational creativity and innovation. The more one rated the organizational climate for creativity, team climate for innovation, change/employee-oriented leadership style, work resources, and less workload, the higher was the organization rated as creative and innovative. On the importance of the context, the results of study III also implied that, although creativity mainly was experienced to be an individual phenomenon, the context had an important if not a determining role for how organizational creativity and innovation were experienced. Contextual aspects such as structure dependency, organizational defences, collaboration difficulties, and political cannibalism, among other things, made it difficult for the engineers to be creative at their work. Regarding well-being, the results of study I suggested that organizational creativity and innovation might be means to increase psychological well-being. In study II, the results implied that the more creative the climate was rated, the less did employees experience stress. Furthermore, in study II, stress was predicted by a relation-oriented leadership, indicating the importance of the leader for the well-being of the employees. The results of study II suggested that educational level is a more relevant dimension than gender with regard to experiencing the organizational climate and leadership but not with regard to experiencing stress and workload. The results indicated that well educated people experienced the climate for creativity as more beneficial and the leadership as more change/employee-oriented than less educated, and women experienced stress and workload more than men. Taken together, the results pointed at the importance of the context for how creativity is experienced and to the importance of the relationship between organizational creativity and innovation and well-being. The assumptions made regarding organizational creativity and innovation leading to a better well-being and a creative organizational climate leading to less stress are limited and needs to be further developed, especially concerning the causality of the relationships, within the context of organizations.