Spanning the Creative Space between Home and Work: Leisure Time, Hobbies and Organizational Creativity

This paper explores the link between employee leisure time activities and the value of their creative output. We argue that leisure time activities – both in general, and specifically with regard to the employee’s choice of hobbies – both illuminate and shape the attitudes and attributes the employee brings to work. Based on Woodman et al.’s (1993) “interactionist perspective” on organizational creativity, supplemented by literature on search and knowledge/combination, we explore whether leisure time activities can span the creative space between the employee’s home and workplace – given the range of multi-level inputs that may also contribute to workplace creativity. We use original survey data comprising 4,138 inventions from 21 European countries, the United States and Japan, in all major industries. Organizational creativity is measured by the asset value of the patent on the associated invention, and the degree of radicalness of the invention. We find that employees who continue to think about their workplace research while away from work produce more valuable inventions. Diversity of hobbies, more socially oriented hobbies, and more focused hobbies are also positively related to invention value.