“My feeling is that the concept of creativeness and the concept of healthy, self-actualizing, fully-human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing”.
(Maslow 1963, p. 4).
Abstract
In answering the question of what influences satisfaction with creativity in the workplace, this work takes into account the extent to which the organization supports human aspiration to act creatively. The work throughout reflects a pragmatist approach to creativity and fulfillment, bridging it with needs theory in psychology. The empirical model uses survey data encompassing over 4,000 workers in Italian social enterprises. Results show that satisfaction with creativity is supported, at organizational level, by teamwork, autonomy, domain-relevant competences, as well as by inclusive, fair processes and relationships. At the individual level, satisfaction with creativity is enhanced by the strength of intrinsic initial motivations. The analysis of interaction terms shows that teamwork and workers’ initial motivations are complementary in enhancing satisfaction with creativity, while a high degree of domain-relevant competences appears to substitute advice and supervision by superiors in accomplishing the desired level of creative action.
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Notes
Social cooperatives, in Italy, are part of the wider legal category of social enterprises. These can be identified as cooperatives, entrepreneurial non-profit organizations and not-for-profit investor owned companies. In particular, social cooperatives have been regulated by Law 381/1991, while social enterprises have been regulated by Law 118/2005, and by Decree 155/2006.
With his theory of value, Dewey recognizes the importance of experience and enquiry in realigning established habits and rules with individual desires, emphasizing the uniqueness and diversity of the individual experience (Dewey 1917). The emphasis of this process of inter-subjective evaluation is on the learning matured with experience, through critical appraisal. It follows that the value attached to attained ends, including their novelty, is not known prior to experience.
Innovation studies, in particular, show that conflict is reduced and group cohesion enhanced when objectives are clear and when the team is successful in reaching them (Mullen and Copper 1994).
Italian social cooperatives have a not-for-profit objective and are of two different types: Type A and Type B. Type A social cooperatives deliver social services, while Type B social cooperatives must include in their workforce a relevant share (30% at least) of disadvantaged workers (e.g. the disabled, the addicted, single parents, former detainees). Most Type B social cooperatives work in traditional industrial sectors. About 80% of the paid workforce in the SISC database works in Type A social cooperatives.
The index has been published in Italy by IlSole24Ore, www.ilsole24ore.it, accessed July 2010.
The survey was conducted between 2004 and 2007 by the Universities of Brescia, Milan, Naples, Reggio Calabria, and Trento with the support of the Ministry of University and Scientific Research (MIUR).
Further research includes tests concerning the enodgeneity of regressors and, in light of our conceptual framework, the causal relation running from organizational processes to satisfaction. Instruments have been mainly drawn from contextual conditions, such as geographic location and index of socio-economic development, and from organizational variables, such as managerial policies directed to the implementation of a creative and fair work environment. Results (which are available from the authors upon request) are encouraging, though not final, as they show that teamwork, procedural fairness and relationship with superiors may be considered exogenous factors impacting on satisfaction. Also, the analysis demonstrates the relevance of the used instruments and does not contradict validity in the case of involvement, procedural fairness and relationship with superiors.
The analysis of interaction terms was set up by focusing on the most relevant determinants of SwC. Six regressors were identified: teamwork, autonomy in innovation, involvement, relationships with superiors, required competencies and motivations ex-ante. Autonomy in innovation was preferred to autonomy because the latter did not show significant interactions. Relationship with superiors was preferred to procedural fairness since, while the two regressors show a widely coextensive impact on satisfaction, the former appears slightly more relevant than the latter.
The five interactions including the degree of required competences show a high degree of multi-collinearity with all the other five organizational dimensions (correlation coefficients equal or higher than 0.93). This is taken to mean that workers perceive a high degree of required competencies whenever they are involved in the considered organizational dimensions. In the estimates in Table 4, after carefully controlling for the sensitivity of the estimated parameters, we include the collinear interaction between required competences and fair relationships with managers since it evidences a significant trade-off in terms of impact on SwC.
The analysis of the formal governance and contractual structure should be deepened because, for example, the status of workers as members of the organization can interact in important ways with the legal constraints defined by labor contracts.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to thank EURICSE (European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises) for sharing the SISC survey and data on which our empirics are based. We wish to thank Sascha Becker, Leonardo Becchetti, Maurizio Carpita, Stefano Castriota, Jerry Hallier, Roger Sugden and Marica Manisera for comments, suggestions and methodological advice. We also wish to acknowledge the 2009 ICA Conference participants in Oxford, in particular to Carlo Borzaga, Silvio Goglio, Roger Spears, and the participants in the session “Employee Motivation, Wages and Incentives: Cross-sector Comparisons” at the 2011 Academy of Management annual meeting in San Antonio. Thanks in particular to Avner Ben-Ner for discussing the paper and for his critical comments at the VII symposium held at the Pontifical Lateran University on ‘Persons, Society, Institutions’, Rome 2010. The survey was made possible by the financial support of the Italian Ministry for Scientific Research, 2004 PRIN scheme (Research Projects of National Interest) coordinated by the University of Trento. The survey was supported also by the CaRiPLo Foundation. The project was carried out in collaboration with ISSAN (Italian Institute for Not-for-Profit Enterprises) and, since 2008, with EuRICSE (European Research Institute for Cooperative and Social Enterprises) in Trento. Usual disclaimers apply. Last but not least, we wish to thank the editor and reviewers of this journal.
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Sacchetti, S., Tortia, E.C. Satisfaction with Creativity: A Study of Organizational Characteristics and Individual Motivation. J Happiness Stud 14, 1789–1811 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-012-9410-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-012-9410-y