Environmental stimulants of creativity for operatives and non-creative workers

Abstract

Competing with low cost production from developing countries is difficult for European companies as well for companies from other developed countries. Innovations can be one of their best competitive advantages in this fight. This may be the reason why innovation and creativity management is such a popular topic today. Many papers and research examining innovation management can be found describing conditions to support creativity of employees and ways to enhance their innovation potential. Despite the fact that well-known works of Amabaile or Ekvall were discussed and developed in many other works, there is a lack of information whether these conditions have the same effect also on operatives and non-creative workers. In big industrial companies, operatives represent large part of company's employees and they are close to the manufacturing process. For these reasons, they are able to come with innovative ideas (especially with regards to process innovation) that could not be seen by knowledge workers, officers and executives. Although companies mostly recognize this potential, there is nearly no academic evidence of potential specifics of factors enhancing creativity and innovative work behaviour of operatives. The main objective of this paper is to refer about quantitative questionnaire research among operatives and non-creative workers in big Czech business companies during autumn 2013. This research focused on the importance of work environmental stimulants and obstacles described by Amabile. It is to find out whether these work environmental stimulants lead to process innovation among operatives or not and which of these stimulants are the most successful in achieving this goal. It is also to find out if the work environmental obstacles hinder process innovation among these employees. The collected data were analyzed by means of regression analysis and only small evidence was found for environmental stimulants and obstacles. The Poisson model was then used to verify the final model with only one Amabile's environmental stimulant accepted and statistically verified.