Creativity and Stress

Involvement in an organizational change programme presented an opportunity to study relationships between stress and creativity in the organization. Levels of stress were close to population norms, whereas the scores from the Creative Climate Questionnaire indicated a stagnated (as opposed to innovative) organization. Strong negative correlations between stress and creative climate scores were found, especially for stress arising from relationships with others and from organizational structure and climate. In addition, differences in both stress and creativity scores were found between samples from five different levels in the organizations hierarchy. The higher the level, the less the stress and the better the perceived creative climate. It is suggested that this is a function of the type of culture pertaining in the organization. Keywords: Creative climate, occupational stress, organizational hierarchy.