Time Pressure and Creativity

Does being pressured for time enhance or hurt curiosity? With business, this is a very important question for managers as they try to meet their organizational goals with the limited resources available to them. Clearly there is a relationship between time pressure and creativity, but what is it? Researchers have studied this for a long time. Acoording to researchers Teresa Amabile, Constance Hadley, Setven Kramer, in general there is a linear relationship between the two. In other words pressure helps to a certain extent, and then after that the pressure has a negative impact on creatvity.

This being said, there are cases of extreme time pressure where genious has shown through. Take for instance the NASA team during the nearly catastrophic mission. The NASA team had an extreme time pressure to try and fix the air filtration system and they succeed. On the other hand, many great ideas have come up where researchers or scientists have had no time pressure at all. In both cases these are extremes.

So what does that mean for companines and managers who seem to always be under time pressure? It sounds pretty dismal, but time pressure and creativty can act in different ways together depending on the environment and the individuals. From my experience, I would say some time pressure is great, but at some point time pressure definitely hurts creativity!

Source: Time Management, Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation 2005