Political correctness at workplace fosters creativity

Bosses, take note! Motivating employees to be politically correct at workplace can make them more creative, a new study suggests.
People may associate political correctness with conformity but new research has found it also correlates with creativity in work settings.
Imposing a norm that sets clear expectations of how women and men should interact with each other into a work environment unexpectedly encourages creativity among mixed-sex work groups by reducing uncertainty in relationships.
The study highlights a paradoxical consequence of the political correctness (PC) norm.
While PC behaviour is generally thought to threaten the free expression of ideas, Professor Jennifer Chatman from University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business and her co-authors found that positioning such PC norms as the office standard provides a layer of safety in the workplace that fosters creativity.

"Setting a norm that both clarifies expectations for appropriate behaviour and makes salient the social sanctions that result from using sexist language unleashes creative expression by countering the uncertainty that arises in mixed-sex work groups," said Chatman.

The authors designed their experiments taking into account the different incentives men and women have for adhering to the PC norm.
Men said they were motivated to adhere to a PC norm because of concerns about not being overbearing and offending women.
Whereas one might expect women to perceive a PC norm as emblematic of weakness or conformity, women in the experiment became more confident about expressing their ideas out loud when the PC norm was salient or prominent.

In contrast, in work groups that were homogeneous - all men or all women - a salient PC norm had no impact on the group's creativity compared to the control group.
Study participants were randomly divided into mixed sex groups and same sex groups.
Next, researchers asked the groups to describe the value of PC behaviour before being instructed to work together on a creative task. The control groups were not exposed to the PC norm before beginning their creative task.
The task involved brainstorming ideas on a new business entity to be housed in a property left vacated by a mismanaged restaurant - by design, a project that has no right or wrong strategy.

Instead of stifling their ideas, mixed-sex groups exposed to the PC norm performed more creatively by generating a significantly higher number of divergent and novel ideas than the control group.
As expected, same sex groups generated fewer creative outcomes.
The study was published in the journal Administrative Science Quarterly.