Boredom Could be a Driver for Creativity and Performance

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Boredom Could be a Driver for Creativity and Performance

Negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, depression, and boredom are believed to generate behavioural issues and declined performance at work. However, research by Park, Lim and Oh (2019) surprisingly shows that compared to the other negative emotions, BOREDOM might not be that bad after all...

Boredom is the unpleasant and dissatisfied feeling when a person lacks stimulation and has trouble concentrating on the job on hand. Feeling bored pushes people to change the current situation and may trigger curiosity and facilitate learning in individuals.

Research on Boredom. Findings

• Boredom helps boost individual productivity on an idea-generation task in terms of the number and uniqueness of ideas.
• A higher level of boredom conditions increases only boredom, but no other negative emotions that are mixed with boredom, such as anger or frustration.
• Boredom influences individual creativity differently. People with a higher level of openness to experience, need for cognition (NOC), goal orientation (LGO), and internal locus of control (LOC) benefit more from being bored than others.

Implications for Managers

• Boredom as latent energy could be managed for the benefit of individuals and organisations.
• Managers need to be mindful about inducing boredom in the work environment to improve creativity and performance. For example, companies who have spaces for employees to nap or spend time to get recharged might think of replacing entertainment equipment with things such as bowls of coloured beans.
• Managers also need to be more aware of the unique traits of individuals, such as openness to experience, NOC, LGO, and internal LOC. By doing that, they can achieve their desired employee performance outcome by arranging some "boredom periods" during the day.

Source: Park, G., Lim, B. and Oh, H., 2019. Why Being Bored Might Not Be a Bad Thing After All. Academy of Management Discoveries, 5(1), pp.78-92.

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		3 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	Boredom and Creativity Interesting, so boredom could also stimulate people to become more creative! If you're interested in making people more creative, then also take a look at the amazing best practice 63 Ways to Stimulate Employee Creativity and Innovativeness. I referenced this one as the 64th one:-).

		1 Anonymous
	Walking and Creativity In my experience, walking is also very conducive to creativity. Perhaps because long walks are somewhat boring for your brain... As writer Rebecca Solnit writes in her book "Wanderlust: A History of Walking": "Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It's best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.".

		0 John Henry Project Manager, United States
	I Think This is a Personal Reflection, not a Business One Boredom is a reflection of your interest and commitment to your task at hand. If you are idle, and stay idle, you will become bored. If you are bored and idle at work, you need to "walk" to the nearest job center and find something that will interest you and will keep you engaged. This will re-engage your mind and your problem solving and process improvement skills will be activated. And you will become instantly creative. So if you are idle, find something to do that may require creativity. Doing so may also disrupt the boredom and idleness in others. And for that your organization should thank you.

		2 Maurice Hogarth Consultant, United Kingdom
	Create Boredom to Manage for Motivation So: "Feeling bored pushes people to change the current situation and may trigger curiosity and facilitate learning in individuals." From newspaper and TV reports and conversations I have known for some time that bored 'youth' did things (crime-vandalism-drug taking-playing hooky etc.) to counter their boredom, while from personal experience I know that bored adults at work were a major reason for wildcat strikes and absenteeism, with creative thinking generating valid (rationalised) reasons. Yet 'research' was needed to 'discover that boredom can be a reason (MOTIV[e]) for people taking the action (ATION) that will change the situation and stop them from feeling bored. BOREDOM stems from the mind not having enough to occupy it while IDLENESS is a consequence of the body not having enough to do, with this also being likely to result in boredom. Boredom is also likely from the idleness consequent upon having the resources that enable one to not have to do anything. However, 'idling' is a term relating to 'ticking over' prior to an acceleration (e.g. motors). Idling is a conscious decision to do 'nothing', i.e. to 'not work', a conscious decision to twiddle one's thumbs; to switch off, have 'down-time', take a walk, to relax and refresh between activities. Idling can be a form of dreaming, enabling the sub-conscious to creatively pull together the bits and pieces of some jigsaw thinking into a picture that then becomes the stimulus for action. Agreed that being seen to be apparently sitting doing nothing can give us a bad image and so we may disguise this by taking a walk. A participative manager will have educated those who work with her/him that 'thinking time' is a valid work activity (for some of the time) but results will be required. Many managers have done excellent jobs in creating boredom at work, pity they haven't done an equally good one at using it to cause motivation and creativity at work.