Pandemonium jolts everyday creativity – a case study analysis

This article addresses everyday creativity, which will be interpreted as a phenomenon that a certain reference group finds original and novel. Quantitative meta-studies of Torrance (1972), Rose, and Lin (1984) as well as Scott, Leritz and Mumford (2004) indicate that creativity training has a clear and notable effect on people. Research shows that everyday creativity, or Small-c creativity, makes people "feel happy and enlivened" (Silvia et al. 2014). Creativity also improves people's well-being and helps them maintain or improve both physical and mental health (Richards, 2007). Zhu, Chen, Tang, Cao, Hou, and Qiu (2016) enable us to understand certain brain activities in terms of cognitive processes connected with everyday creativity. However, despite the plethora of knowledge available on creativity and the positive effect creativity training has on people only scant research is available about everyday creativity produced by common people at work (Amabile, 2017; Zhu, Chen, Tang, Cao, Hou, and Qiu, 2016). This article presents a comparative analysis of three cases to find common and essential elements in everyday creativity and to determine whether it will benefit managers to provide common people in ordinary jobs creativity training.