The Potency of Managerial Work Redesign for Raising Creative Performance: A Student Sample Experiment

Abstract

The paper explores the potency of managerial work redesign (MWR) for raising employees’ creative performance, based on the job crafting theory that emphasizes changes in task, relational and cognitive task boundaries for adapting a job locally during the work process. Grounded in the interactionist approach, the joint effect of three job redesign types is considered, as they typically occur simultaneously. The hypotheses were tested through a laboratory experiment conducted in four phases on a sample of 88 full-time graduate students, and creative results were quantified using three creative performance indicators: number of ideas, number of novel ideas, and novelty ratio. Managerial work redesign was found to contribute significantly to each of the explored creativity outcomes. Moreover, the creativity traits of a person were not found to be a requirement for fully benefiting from MWR interventions, implying that MWR is a potential tool for increasing employees’ creative outcomes no matter of creative predispositions. The study is one of the first quantitative studies testing the impact of MWR mechanisms on creative performance through experimental design.