New research has shown that employees who are not in positions of power can increase creativity when given time to “warm up” to a task by engaging in a creative task more than once. “This is important because when people with more power can express their creative ideas more than those with less power, it leads to richer-to-richer mobility that reinforces or exacerbates these power differences, said Brian Lucas, assistant professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and co-author of “The Low Power Warm-Up Effect: Understanding the Effect of Power on Creativity Over Time,” appearing in the July issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The ones are
“Understanding the ways in which low-power workers boost their creativity can help them navigate this low-power disadvantage, generate more creative ideas, and foster a more equitable workplace,” Lucas said. In the study, Lucas and his co-authors found that although low-power individuals are less creative than high-power individuals at the beginning of a creative task, they may eventually catch up to the creativity of high-power individuals and can match them.
This is because creative work provided a sense of autonomy and liberation that ultimately helped them overcome the disadvantages of being underpowered, the researchers said. Lucas and his co-authors conducted three studies to reach their conclusions. In the first study, they divided the creative idea generation session into two rounds, which included a one-minute “warm up” followed by a second round, which participants could take as long as they wanted.
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Participants were randomly assigned to a high-power condition or a low-power condition, and feelings of power were induced with a role manipulation where participants were assigned a leadership role and control over resources ( higher power) or was given the role of an employee without any control. resource (low power). The study found that high power individuals were more creative than low power individuals during the warm-up period. However, there was no difference in creativity in the second round.
In the second study, the researchers changed the creative task and increased the number of rounds from two sessions to five, depending on the amount of time they had to complete the task. In the final study, they used two different creative tasks over two rounds, both of which were one minute long. In line with the first study, these studies found that individuals with high power were more creative than individuals with low power in the first period.
But the creativity of low-powered individuals “caught up” to the creativity of high-powered individuals after the first round. The results of the third study demonstrated that a different creativity task could warm-up even low-power people to an unrelated creativity task. “The experience of being creative can in itself have positive psychological consequences,” Lucas said.
“Given the high value of creative ideas to organizations and to the careers of the employees who champion them, it is important to develop strategies that empower all employees to harness their creative potential,” he said. “The low power warm-up effect suggests a simple intervention that does exactly that and addresses the power gap in the workplace: When performing creative tasks, allow employees to warm up first.”