DissertationCreative Work and well-being
Abstract
Psychological research often focuses on how to make workers more creative, neglecting possible consequences of their struggle for creativity. My PhD project fills in this gap by investigating how creative work relates to workersâ well-being.
Creative workforce consists of artists, engineers, researchers, designers, and entrepreneurs. A rapidly growing creative sector employs an increasing number of these professionals. Yet little is known about the differences in working conditions between creative workers and other types of highly qualified specialists. Previous research classifies all professionals as knowledge workers: the primary purpose of their jobs involves the creation, distribution and application of knowledge. Creative workers, however, could be distinguished from this group according to one key criterion - the requirement for creativity. It means that their success (and income) depends almost solely on their generation of novel and potentially marketable insights or solutions. Such requirement is likely to produce more cognitive resources at work: more challenging tasks, more undefined problems, and more freedom in solving them. Therefore, in this PhD project I will investigate whether creative workers share a specific work resources profile, and what are its consequences for work related well-being.
The dissertation will be based on three empirical studies:
- a longitudinal analysis aimed at identifying a job resources profile characteristic for creative work, and its long-term consequences for well-being;
- a cross-sectional investigation into cognitive job resources available to creative workers, and their connections to daily well-being;
- an intervention study that examines immediate reactions to solving a creative task in terms of feelings and functioning of an individual.
In sum, in this project I aim to a) understand the relationship between creative work and well-being, and b) evaluate appropriate construct measurement of creative work.