Spaces for Creativity: Unconventional Workspaces and Divergent Thinking

Companies are adopting unconventional workspaces—often characterized by bright or oddly colored walls, unique light fixtures, unusual office furniture, vibrant artwork, the display of atypical non–work-related objects, and casual and playful atmospheres—to foster creativity. Yet empirical evidence on the causal effect of such unconventional workspaces on creativity has been lacking. Across four experiments involving a total sample of 1,133 participants, we tested the effect of unconventional workspaces on individuals’ divergent thinking: the process of generating many and distinct ideas to solve a given task. Contrary to our initial expectations, we found that unconventional workspaces did not always boost divergent thinking and even hindered it. Specifically, unconventional workspaces were harmful when solutions for a divergent task could be readily inspired by the workspace’s features because of cognitive anchoring. Hence, the positive effect of unconventional workspaces was significant only when the potential solutions for the divergent-thinking task were unrelated to features of the workspace. These findings provide important evidence of the causal effects of unconventional workspaces on the process of creativity and highlight crucial boundary conditions for such effects.

This paper was accepted by Elena Katok, operations management.

Funding: This research was supported by the Heinrich and Esther Baumann–Steiner Fund for Creativity and Business at INSEAD and the Center for Organizational Learning, Innovation, and Knowledge at the Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.02052.