Taking Time to Incubate: The Moderating Role of ‘What You Do’ and ‘When You Do It’ on Creative Performance

Do human work interruptions bring positive affective responses?-Based on the mediation of coping potential and the moderation of polychronicity

This research aims to investigate the impact of human work interruptions on positive affective responses and their underlying mechanisms in the Chinese context. In the first stage, this study conducted face-to-face semi-structured interviews with 29 employees representing diverse industries. The grounded theory research method was used to extract the construct of human work interruption, identify its core attributes, and capture the naturally emerging storyline of "human work interruptions - coping potential - polychronicity - positive affective responses". In the second stage, a theoretical model was constructed and validated using 362 questionnaires. The results indicate that in the Chinese context: (1) human work interruptions can trigger positive affective responses; (2) coping potential mediates the relationship between human work interruptions and positive affective responses; (3) when individuals have a higher level of polychronicity, the impact of human work interruptions on positive affective responses via coping potential is enhanced. The findings of this study effectively address the hypothesis of the "positive aspect" of work interruptions proposed by management scholars and contribute to the existing literature on work interruptions and positive affective responses. Moreover, this research provides practical and theoretical implications for managers and employees in managing and coping with human work interruptions.

Unexpected Interruptions, Idle Time, and Creativity: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Interruptions are common in organizational life and last from seconds and minutes to hours and days. We rely on a quantitative abductive strategy to determine how extended work interruptions shape employees’ creativity. We start by studying how surprising interruptions that cause idle time affect employees’ creative performance. We do so by exploiting a natural experiment—a supply chain shortage that caused unexpected stops in production plants—to show that individuals exposed to such an interruption produce 58% more ideas than uninterrupted employees in the three weeks after the interruption. We corroborate this effect in a replication and extend it to idea quality. Investigating the effect’s causes, we then show that we do not find the same effects for two other interruption types: for unexpected interruptions without idle time (i.e., intrusions), we find a negative effect on creative performance because employees forcefully disengage from their work and switch their attention to the interrupting task. For expected interruptions with idle time (i.e., planned breaks), we also find no positive effect on creative performance because employees discretionally disengage from work and focus on nonwork and leisure goals. We consider and evaluate three different theoretical explanations for our findings: attention residue, cognitive stimulation, and recovery. We end our abductive process by putting attention residue forward as the most likely explanation. Finally, we suggest three propositions based on our findings and discuss our contributions to the literature on interruptions and creativity in organizations.

Funding: T. G. Schweisfurth acknowledges funding from the Tempowerk Technology Center Hamburg.

Examples facilitate divergent thinking: The effects of timing and quality

The study investigated the effects of examples' timing and quality on divergent thinking (DT). In study 1, participants received two novel or common examples in the early or late stage of the realistic presented problem task. Results revealed higher fluency and flexibility in the late stage than that in the early stage. Moreover, originality was higher in the novel-example condition than that in the common-example condition. In study 2, participants solved alternative uses task (AUT) and received examples as in study 1. Results replicated beneficial effects of timing and quality on DT in study 1. Furthermore, in the late stage, fluency and flexibility were higher in the novel-example condition than that in the common one. These findings indicate that timing and quality affect example effect on DT, with late or novel examples facilitating DT. More importantly, in AUT, examples quality moderates the role of timing in DT's fluency and flexibility.

Charting the contributions of cognitive flexibility to creativity: Self-guided transitions as a process-based index of creativity-related adaptivity

Creativity is pivotal to solving complex problems of many kinds, yet how cognitive flexibility dynamically supports creative processes is largely unexplored. Despite being a crucial multi-faceted contributor in creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, as typically assessed, does not fully capture how people adaptively shift between varying or persisting in their current problem-solving efforts. To fill this theoretical and methodological gap, we introduce a new operationalization of cognitive flexibility: the process-based Self-Guided Transition (SGT) measures, which assess when participants autonomously choose to continue working on one of two concurrently presented items (dwell length) and how often they choose to switch between the two items (shift count). We examine how these measures correlate with three diverse creativity tasks, and with creative performance on a more complex "garden design" task. Analyses of the relations between these new cognitive flexibility measures in 66 young adults revealed that SGT dwell length positively correlated with creative performance across several tasks. The SGT shift count positively correlated with within-task performance for a two-item choice task tapping divergent thinking (Alternative Uses Task) but not for a two-item choice task calling on convergent thinking (Anagram task). Multiple regression analyses revealed that, taken together, both the shift count and dwell length measures from the Alternative Uses Task explained a significant proportion of variance in measures of fluency, and originality, on a composite measure of the three independently-assessed creative tasks. Relations of SGTs to the Garden Design task were weaker, though shift count on the Alternative Uses Task was predictive of a composite measure of overall Garden Design quality. Taken together, these results highlight the promise of our new process-based measures to better chart the dynamically flexible processes supporting creative thinking and action.