How physical and non-physical working environment affects creativity : An empirical study

Article history: Received October 25 2010 Received in revised form 01 February 2011 Accepted 02 March 2011 Available online 03 March 2011 Creativity is one of the most important factors to increase the productivity of any organization. There are literally different factors influencing creativity such as physical and non-physical components of a system. There are different studies to confirm that both physical and nonphysical issues could impact the efficiency, significantly. The study of this paper considers eleven physical and ten non-physical activities in working environment of six organizations with various business activities of educational, manufacturing and service business. The study summarizes the most and the least important physical and non-physical factors based on some statistical tests. © 2011 Growing Science Ltd.  All rights reserved.


Introduction
Creativity and innovations are two most important items in leading of any organization to a valued added firm.A creative firm could compete with its rivals more strongly and it could pass economical crises easier.Therefore, there is a need to setup a good environment to build better working conditions to help employees become more creative.During the past few decades, there have been tremendous efforts to determine significant factors influencing the creativity of working environments (Siegel & Kaemmerer, 1978;Schneider, 1987;Reilly, 2008).Hird (2001) examined a hypothesis on whether a change organization's structure could change the creativity.He reported that merging different drug companies could reduce the creativity.Rice (2006) performed a survey among Egyptian employees based on a questionnaire incorporating the Schwartz value and reported that selfdirection is a relatively important value for creativity in the workplace.Sehat (2010) performed a study to examine the relationship between some middle-east principals' creativity and personnel's productivity in technical-vocational colleges and he found that culture and attitudes toward the organization could influence productivity, significantly.Menzel et al. (2007) described some methods to make engineers active in the area of intrapreneurship within big firms where they often are hired in R&D.Slater et al. (2010) determined important factors influencing marketing strategy creativity and marketing strategy implementation effectiveness.The study of this paper focuses on physical and non-physical working segments to see whether they could influence the creativity of organizations.There are various factors categorized in either physical or non-physical items and they are summarized in Table1.The paper performs a questionnaire survey for both items in different organizations with various business natures.The questions are distributed among a sample of workers and the results are analyzed using a statistical analysis.The organization of this paper first explains the details of survey in section 2. Section 3 reports the details of the implementation and the conclusion remarks are given in section 4 to summarize the contribution of the paper.

The proposed methodology
The primary objective of this paper is to find out how physical or non-physical components of an organization can impact the creativity of an organization.The main questions of this research are as follows, 1.The effects of physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in ideal position.2. The effects of physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in present position.3. The effects of non-physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in ideal position.4. The effects of non-physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in present position.5. The effects of physical and non-physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in ideal position.6.The effects of physical and non-physical working environments on increasing creativity of an organization in present position.
The questionnaire has two main sections where the first one is associated with the present conditions and the second one is associated with the ideal condition.The questions are also divided into two categories of physical and non-physical working parameters.We use Likert (1932) based scales for our questions from one to five where one represents for completely effective and five is considered for highly ineffective items.

The results
The statistical population of this survey consists of the municipality, Justice, universities, refineries, power plants and transportation units.We have used cluster sampling in two stages of 30 and 350 samples, respectively.The purpose of the first stage is to validate the questionnaire and in the second stage we use the results of our survey to analyze the results.The sample of the next step covers with a possibility of 95 percent covers over 80 percent of the population needed for the survey and 332 responses were gathered.The implementation of kruskal-wallis (Kruskal & Wallis, 1952) and kalmogorov-smiranov (Corder & Foreman, 2009) tests indicates that our input data are not normally distributed.Kruskal-wallis is a one-way analysis of variance by ranks and it is considered as a nonparametric method for testing equality of population medians among different groups.Let i n be the number of observations in group i, ij r be the rank of observation j from group i and N be the total number of observations across all groups.The Kruskal-wallis (K) test is calculated as follows, , ) ( The critical value of chi-square 2 1 , − g α χ can be found with g − 1 degrees of freedom and a desired significance or alpha level.The null hypothesis of equal population medians is rejected if We can also use chi-square test for our discrete intervals and we also use kalmogovov-smiranov and man-whitney tests to compare two independent groups which are not normally distributed.Table 2 summarizes the frequency of the raw data gathered.
Table 3 also shows the results of comparison tests among different groups.Based on the results we can conclude that the computer & sufficient light as well as diversity of working items & library are in the same groups and these two groups include the most important factors that could increase creativity in an organization.The other factors of good communication service with good pictures hanging on the wall have the least influence on the creativity of people.
Another test, which was performed in our study is associated with non-physical conditions in the present situations of organizations and the results are summarized in Table 5 , which means there is significant difference among all non-physical items.The first two rows of table 5 indicate that being purposeful in working environment as well as a joyful space could significantly increase the creativity of an organization while the other factors such as lack of concern regarding the design of new ideas tolerance of accepting new ideas have less effect on creativity.In order to see whether there is any difference between the ideal and the present conditions, we performed a Mann-Whitney test (Corder & Foreman, 2009) and Table 6 shows the details of the implementation of this test.As we can observe from Table 6, all tests imply that there are some meaningful differences between the physical and non-physical items in both present and ideal conditions.

Conclusions
In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to determine the most effective physical and nonphysical parameters affecting working environment to increase creativity.The proposed study of this paper has concluded that, among the physical environment elements, the computer & sufficient light as well as diversity of working items & library are in the same groups and these two groups include the most important factors that could increase creativity in an organization.The other factors of good communication service with good pictures hanging on the wall have the least influence on the creativity of people.The study also concludes that, among non-physical items, being purposeful in working environment as well as a joyful space could significantly increase the creativity of an organization while the other factors such as lack of concern regarding the design of new ideas tolerance of accepting new ideas have less effect on creativity.

Table 1
Physical and non-physical items influencing creativity

Table 3 and
Table4demonstrate the details of the kruskal-wallis test for 10 physical working environments in idea position.As we can observe there is a meaningful difference for ideal position.

Table 5
The statistical ranking comparison for non-physical conditions in present situations

Table 6
The results of our Mann-Whitney test