Happy Couples Demonstrate Higher Creativity At Work
Hong Kong researchers investigated if satisfying marriages and family relationships influence employee’s workplace creativity and their ability to be innovative.
Key points:
- Happy marriages and relationships promote higher creativity at work.
- This creativity boost is only observed in less creative employees.
- Researchers advise companies should not neglect family-friendly policies.
Many organizations are focusing more and more on shaping a comfortable work environment to maximize employees’ productivity. But often they underestimate the impact family-friendly policies have on workers’ creative potential. Professor Xu Huang from the School of Business of Hong Kong Baptist University in his latest research discovered these interconnections:
- Employees that are satisfied with their relationships or marriages show a significant increase in their creativity at work.
- When an employee’s partner is also feeling happy, this effect is more noticeable and boosts their ability to generate innovative solutions at work even more.
- What’s interesting, this positive overflow was only observed in less creative individuals, as highly creative people don’t rely as much on resources from a happy relationship.
- On the other hand, if the employee’s home environment is unpleasant, it negatively affects his/her work performance.
For organizations to increase innovative capabilities, researchers recommend providing family-friendly policies, especially marriage-related measures. They say there are many ways to do that, whether it’s offering relationship-counseling services or letting an employee a day off on his/her marriage anniversary. In the end, such measures will benefit both the employee and the company.
Source: