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Why Being Creative at Work Can Feel Scary
New research explores a common psychological obstacle to creativity
Your boss stands in front of a whiteboard, wielding a dry-erase pen. “We’re just brainstorming!” she says. “There’s no such thing as a bad idea.”
You look around at your co-workers, hoping one of them will go first. As you clear your throat to speak, your palms start to sweat.
Are you overthinking it? Probably. But of course there are bad ideas in brainstorming. A few minutes ago, Greg suggested replacing everyone’s desk chair with a mini-treadmill.
And you’re probably not the only one who dreads the order to be “creative.” As new research explains: Creativity, especially at work, is super stressful. It’s much more than just generating ideas on command. Often, it can feel like a high-stakes baring of the soul — an invitation for your colleagues to view and critique the inner workings of your mind.
“There’s relatively little work on the consequences of actually sharing creative ideas,” says organizational psychologist Jack Goncalo, a professor at the University of Illinois. In the past, most research on workplace creativity has focused on strategies to enhance it, whether by switching up office floor plans, painting the walls aqua, or offering cash rewards for original ideas. But Goncalo’s latest study, published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, explores an important psychological obstacle to creativity: the very real possibility that you’ll be judged for it.
The inspiration for his research came to Goncalo while he was at a real estate open house with friends. Riffing off a scented candle burning in one of the rooms, they started brainstorming names for other candle scents, like apple pie. Then the real estate agent chimed in with a suggestion so inappropriate, Goncalo says, that he refuses to repeat it. “It stopped conversation. We made all kinds of judgments about him.”
Drawing directly from that experience, Goncalo and his co-author, graduate student Joshua Katz, asked several hundred study volunteers to come up with original names for scented candles and potato chip flavors. (A control group was asked to be as “uncreative” as possible.) When asked about the origin of…
