INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS

It is hard to stay upbeat when your penny-pinching bosses are counting paper clips and coffee grains, but here's some good news: you don't need to be cheery. Workplace discontent may just be a vast, untapped source of creativity.

" For a long time, it seemed that all companies cared about job satisfaction, " says Jing Zhou at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She and colleague Jennifer George wondered whether dissatisfaction was really such a bad thing. To find out, they surveyed 149 employees at a drilling equipment company. Without revealing their ultimate purpose, they asked workers dozens of questions about their work lives, including some to assess their level of job satisfaction. They also interviewed the workers' supervisors and asked them questions about which workers regularly came up with " creative solutions", " fresh approaches" or " new ideas".

Surprisingly, people who were dissatisfied and willing to pipe up were found to be the most creative (Academy of Management Journal, vol 44, p 682). " It was very striking, " says Zhou, " and counter-intuitive. "

Zhou and George reckon that employees who become disgruntled have four options. They can jump ship, taking any ideas they might have had on how to improve things with them, or they can stick around and whine, reaffirm their allegiance, or shirk their work. Neither the loyalists nor the shirkers have any impetus to work for change. The whiners, by contrast, spend a significant part of their day ruminating on how things can be improved. That is a creative force we can no longer afford to ignore, Zhou argues.

She points out that disgruntled employees are often discouraged from voicing complaints, so their valuable insights are stifled. The study found that the creativity of whiners could only be harnessed with the help of supportive colleagues who listened to and channelled their discontent. " Top managers really need to rethink how to do things, " she says.

In a similar vein, Bruce Charlton at the University of Buckingham in the UK says that by overvaluing people who toe the line we are killing creativity in the sciences. In a paper entitled " Why are modern scientists so dull? How science selects for perseverance and sociability at the expense of intelligence and creativity", he argues that the long, tedious road to tenure ruthlessly weeds out the more imaginative people in favour of conscientious scientists who won't rock the boat.

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