Spaces for Creativity: The Role of Physical Environment in Creative Problem Solving

Abstract

Previous literature has studied how the physical space influences organizational processes and outcomes, and recent studies have delved deeper into this topic by examining the impact of organizational decisions such as relocating offices, reconfiguring into open-office layouts, and adopting flexible seating arrangements. However, the literature has often overlooked the role that the actual visual features of physical space could have on organizational members’ behaviors or performance in important areas such as creativity. We investigate whether a visually stimulating physical environment (as a whole) has a causal effect on individual-level creativity. Specifically, we study how two contrasting physical spaces (visually “quiet” vs. visually stimulating spaces) influence the two most widely recognized types of creative thinking—convergent and divergent creative thinking. Taking a controlled experiment approach, we randomly assigned 116 participants to either a visually “quiet” or visually stimulating space and asked them to solve a convergent or divergent creative thinking task. We found that participants performed better in the convergent creative thinking task in the visually stimulating space and that participants performed better in the divergent creative thinking task in the visually “quiet” space. The implications of our findings for organization designers challenge the wide-spread belief that creative workspaces with many visual stimuli serve as silver bullets for fostering creative problem solving.