Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile is in the midst of a ten-year study looking at, among other things, how time pressure in a corporate setting affects employee creativity. Interviewed here she talks about how her study is the first to empirically study creativity in the wild.

By stripping out assumptions and myths about creativity with solid research, she has uncovered some interesting things about creativity, which, in turn, has serious implications for innovation.

Overall, very high levels of time pressure should be avoided if you want to foster creativity on a consistent basis. However, if a time crunch is absolutely unavoidable, managers can try to preserve creativity by protecting people from fragmentation of their work and distractions; they should also give people a sense of being “on a mission,” doing something difficult but important.

Her study has also uncovered insights into how to encourage creativity. Amabile goes on to say that

…our research suggests that managers should try to avoid or reduce the “obstacles to creativity” (time pressure and organizational impediments like political problems, harsh criticism of new ideas, and emphasis on the status quo) and enhance the “stimulants to creativity” (freedom, positive challenge in the work)

On a slightly different – but still relevant note – she talks about a study she did a while back about creativity and motivations. Amabile found that artists were significantly more creative when intrinsically motivated (e.g. by the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself) as opposed to when given large sums of cash and being told to produce something creative.

This reminds me of the story about the Motorola team that developed the Razr phone. They were given all sorts of perks based on the success of the design, but in an interview one of the team said that the greatest reward was the most unexpected. Out of the blue, the key members of the team were asked to attend a meeting which they had no knowledge of. One by one they were bought in. They walked in to face the board of Motorola, who then rose as one to give them a sustained standing ovation.

Now that’s what I call a reward.