Managing creative performance in SMEs

Creative behaviour of employees cannot be understood by considering the individual in isolation from the work environment. In the present paper we focus on work environments that can support creative behaviour of employees in SME’s and we will distinguish between the social-organization work environment (e.g. regarding job design and leadership support) and the physical work environment (e.g. workplace design and building design). We present an instrument (CDQS) to analyse and improve social-organisational and physical work environments. We illustrate the use of the instrument with examples. On the basis of empirical evidence from 379 employees in 31 Dutch SMEs we show that the effect of the social-organisational work environment on employee creativity depends on the “fit” between the employee’s desired environment and the provided (current) environment. For the physical work environment we found that there is an optimum level of provided support, independent of employees’ desires. Hence, providing just more creative elements in the work environment is not always the best solution for stimulating employee creativity. New elements in the paper are that we: • Consider both the social-organizational environment and the physical environment; • Have collected data from SMEs, which can be used for benchmarking companies and for empirical research; • Found that more support is not always better