Enhancing Creativity Through "Mindless" Work: A Framework of Workday Design

By Kimberly D. Elsbach, Andrew B. Hargadon. Organ. Sci., 2006

349 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We propose that organizations use a new framework of workday design to enhance the creativity of today's chronically overworked professionals. Although insights from creativity research have been integrated into models of work design to increase the stimulants of creativity (e.g., intrinsic motivation), this has not led to work design models that have effectively reduced the obstacles to creativity (e.g., workload pressures). As a consequence, creative output among professionals in high-workload contexts remains disappointing. In response, we offer a framework of work design that focuses on the design of entire workdays rather than the typical focus on designing either specific tasks or very broad job descriptions (e.g., as the job characteristics model in Hackman et al. 1975). Furthermore, we introduce the concept of “mindless” work (i.e., work that is low in both cognitive difficulty and performance pressures) as an integral part of this framework. We suggest that to enhance creativity among chronically overworked professionals, workdays should be designed to alternate between bouts of cognitively challenging and high-pressure work (as suggested in the original model by Hackman et al. 1975), and bouts of mindless work (as defined in this paper). We discuss the implications of our framework for theories of work design and creativity.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/27e2e371c3ece1860ff40660b0a5448576d1cd73

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Citations in the corpus

9 Creativity in Organizations (2007, background): “Interestingly, theorizing and research on creativity tends to make the implicit assumption that the same causal factors will operate in a similar manner regardless of the type of creativity that occurs or that researchers are studying, with some exceptions (eg, Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006 ).”
Deepening our understanding of creativity in the workplace: A review of different approaches to creativity research. (2011, background): “Also, Elsbach and Hargadon (2006) suggested that breaks provide a time for nontaxing or mindless work in which the individual can think of non–task-related thoughts.”
Exercise after work, psychological mediators, and affect: A day-level study (2014, background): “Recovery processes can start while being at work, for instance, when changing the type of tasks one engages in (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006 ), during formal breaks (Trougakos, Beal, Green, & Weiss, 2008 ), or between single tasks (Fritz, Lam, & Spreitzer, 2011 ).”
Putting job design in context: Introduction to the special issue (2010, background): “Other papers have advocated equally relevant topics that apply to today’s context, such as designing work to reduce overload (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006) and support resource allocation (Parker & Ohly, 2008), how technological changes necessitate extending work design research into the home…”
Being There: Work Engagement and Positive Organizational Scholarship (2011, background): “Recent research on redesigning the workday advocates forced intermittent downtime (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006), which challenges the general notion that job complexity at all times is a requirement for creativity (Oldham & Cummings, 1996).”
Its the little things that matter: an examination of knowledge workers energy management (2011, neutral): “This might be experienced as taking a moment of mindlessness after finishing one task and before addressing the next task (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006).”
When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity (2020, positive): “When employees choose to work on mindless tasks while procrastinating on a creative problem, does that free up cognitive resources (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006; see also Baird et al., 2012) and minimize the costs of attention residue (Leroy, 2009)?”
Intrinsic and Prosocial Motivations, Perspective Taking, and Creativity (2011, methodology): “Since autonomy can facilitate both intrinsic motivation and creativity (e.g., Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006), we controlled for this job characteristic, measured with the scale developed by Morgeson and Humphrey (2006).”
Creativity, self-efficacy, and small-firm performance: the mediating role of entrepreneurial orientation (2015, background): “Most studies focus on individual (Elsbach and Hargadon 2006; Perry-Smith 2006) or team-level performance (Gilson et al. 2005; Vera and Crossan 2005).”
Giving Time, Time After Time: Work Design and Sustained Employee Participation in Corporate Volunteering (2012, background): “Although scholars have recognized that jobs can be too enriched (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006; Warr, 2007; Xie & Johns, 1995), research has yet to explore the possibility that low enrichment, when coupled with avenues for contributing to the organization outside the scope of one’s job responsibilities,…”