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The authors investigate the links between playfulness and creative organizational climates established by other research, using play cues-objects and sweets-they provide participants halfway through workplace meetings. Their findings suggest such cues significantly enhance the creative climate and playfulness in workplace meetings without risking meeting productivity. Key words: adult playfulness; creative climate; organizational behavior; play and productivity; workplace meetings
THE AVERAGE EMPLOYEE spends more than six hours a week in scheduled meetings. Supervisors spend twice as much time in formal meetings, and in larger organizations, managers spend more than 75 percent of their time preparing and executing meetings (Rogelberg et. al. 2010). Given the sheer abundance of meetings in today's workplaces, meetings are a useful starting point for empirical investigations of how organizational playfulness might be enhanced.
We intend to explore the benefits of encouraging play in workplace meetings. Some research associates organizational play with increased creativity (Mainemelis and Ronson 2006), but experimental studies of organizational play remain rare. In one of our previous studies, we asked creativity consultants and play advocates how they used play in organizations and invited them to share their ideas about how play might benefit creativity (West, Hoff, and Carlsson 2013). We found that practitioners often use playful props or cues to encourage play with their organizational clients. Building on this finding, we set out to investigate how playful cues introduced in workplace meetings affect their creative climate, playfulness, and productivity.
Definitions of Play
As Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) noted, play proves an elusive concept, one easily experienced but difficult to capture theoretically. Stuart Brown (2009) defines play as an absorbing and intrinsically motivated activity, apparently purposeless, that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness. Organizational behaviorists like Charalampus Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson (2006) have suggested that play can best be understood as a behavioral orientation superimposed on work tasks. Play does not need to be completely separated from work because even work tasks can be executed playfully. Understood as an orientation toward a task, the type of activity becomes less important than how we frame and perform it. A playful approach, then, involves an intentional reframing of a situation or a task to make it more enjoyable (Barnett 2007; Glynn and Webster 1992). Thus, play does not need to...