Social Exclusion and Its Hindrance on Creativity
“Spotlight on the Effect of Workplace Ostracism on Creativity: A Social Cognitive Perspective”
Ming Tu, Zhihui Cheng, and Wenxing Liu (2021)
What are the researchers interested in?
“Workplace ostracism is the extent to which an individual perceives that he or she is ignored or excluded at work.”
There is an abundance of IO research that explores the positive antecedents of employee creativity. Tu et al., (2021) realized that the potential effects of negative factors on employee creativity have been mostly overlooked. That being said, a common and underestimated factor affecting employees, which the researchers focused on is ‘workplace ostracism’.
Workplace ostracism has proven to decrease an employee’s sense of belonging, self-esteem, and control. Interestingly, this phenomenon will negatively affect the willingness of employees to dedicate effort to the organization, which will further reinforce ostracism in the workplace. Ostracism may even increase employees’’ perception that new ideas are disparaged and unwelcome (Tu et al., 2021). To understand these factors and how they interlink with one another, we have drawn out a cycle that not only explains the process but also allows a clear visualization:
To this end, Tu and colleagues aim to examine the relationship between workplace ostracism and employee creativity. Utilizing a social cognitive perspective, the researchers posit that workplace ostracism will decrease creativity by decreasing one’s belief in one’s ability to produce creative outcomes; one’s belief in producing creative outcomes is called Creative Self-Efficacy (CSE).
The researchers aim to test five predictions, but I will only be focusing on these three to put the focus on self efficacy and creativity output:
Workplace ostracism is negatively associated with creativity (an increase in ostracism leads to a decrease in creativity)
Workplace ostracism is negatively associated with CSE (increase in ostracism leads to a decrease in CSE)
Workplace ostracism has a negative indirect effect on employee creativity via CSE (CSE works as a mediating factor)
What method did they use?
Researchers recruited employees and their supervisors from one large telecommunication company in China. They used questionnaires to find participants’ perceptions on workplace ostracism, creativity, and their CSE. The supervisors were used to answer any questions about their subordinates.
Variables were measured as follows:
Workplace Ostracism - e.g. “Others ignored you at work”, “You noticed others would not look at you at work”.
Creativity - Supervisors were asked to use a creativity scale to access their subordinates e.g. “This employee generates groundbreaking ideas related to the field”
Creativity Self-Efficacy - e.g. “I have confidence in my ability to solve problems creatively”
What did they end up finding?
The researchers found that employees with higher levels of perceived workplace ostracism results in a decrease in their creativity output. Importantly, this relationship is mediated by an individual's CSE, showing the direct positive effect between ones’ CSE and creativity output. The indirect effect of CSE between workplace ostracism and creativity was significant only when employee’s collectivism is higher (referring to the two other predictions not mentioned here). Collectivism represents the culture of group priority rather than individual autonomy, this cultural orientation is more in line with East Asian countries as opposed to Western countries.
Why does this matter for organizations?
With a surge in new ways to combat work (e.g. flex-work, work-from-home, project management, etc.), organizations and their management team should pay more attention to occurrences of ostracism in the workplace and provide accurate mitigating interventions. Here, researchers have tested and shown that workplace ostracism is detrimental to an employee’s creativity. More specifically, understanding that CSE has a positive effect on creativity output. With this in mind, organizations should double down on training their employee’s self-efficacy as opposed to technical skills – by perhaps implementing and promoting an active engagement of ideas around the workforce. Organizations who successfully do this will not only build a norm of sharing and criticizing ideas but also indirectly help drive innovation and creative outputs in the organization.
References
Ferris, D. L., Brown, D. J., Berry, J. W., & Lian, H. (2008). The development and validation of the Workplace Ostracism Scale. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(6), 1348.
Tu, M., Cheng, Z., & Liu, W. (2019). Spotlight on the effect of workplace ostracism on creativity: a social cognitive perspective. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 1215.