Research agenda
I examine how people develop, sustain, and transfer creative thinking across contexts, and how those processes relate to well-being, relationships, and what people are able to contribute to others.
How does creative thinking develop, and how do organizational contexts support it?
The starting point is a change in how a problem gets represented. I am interested in how people arrive at representations that are new to them, and in the conditions that appear to make that more or less likely.
The aim is practical: to find interventions that help people think creatively, and the organizational conditions that best support them.
How does creative thinking transfer into well-being across life domains?
Ways of thinking practiced at work may carry into the rest of life, and well-being outside work may in turn make them easier to sustain on the job. I am interested in both directions.
What people do at work and outside of it shapes them as whole people. Understanding how the two domains feed each other can help organizations design work that supports employees' well-being across their lives.
How can creative thinking be directed toward other people's needs?
Generating possibilities says nothing about who they are for. I am interested in how people direct their creativity toward other people's needs, and how that prosocial focus relates to their own well-being.
This takes the agenda beyond the individual, to the coworkers, organizations, and communities that benefit from what gets built.
Organizational implications
Organizations set the conditions people create in. Knowing which interventions and contexts support creative thinking gives organizations something concrete to act on.
The three questions also run together. Well-being may help people sustain creative thinking, and creativity directed toward others' needs may in turn help build better organizations. Understanding how that cycle works is what I am trying to find out.
Start a conversation ↗Published work
My master's thesis asks whether creative process engagement at work carries into satisfaction in a romantic relationship, and what creative self-efficacy and supervisor praise have to do with it. It is one study, on one transfer, in one direction.