How to Manage Your Team’s Mood for Creativity and Productivity

The spring issue of Update magazine features my research on how mood affects entrepreneurial creativity. The best entrepreneurial ideas come out of a two-phase process. First comes an idea generation phase that is wide ranging and open to ideas that are creative, perhaps even offbeat and wacky. These ideas set entrepreneurs and their businesses apart from the pack—but the ideas also need to meet criteria that make them solid business propositions. They must be logistically and financially feasible, and, ideally, they represent an innovative solution to a pressing problem, and thus will be highly attractive to customers. So entrepreneurial creativity also includes a second phase of idea selection, in which the ideas from the earlier phase are evaluated in a clear-headed way that enables making a reasoned choice among them.

This two-phase process does not just apply to founders of companies. It is also useful for any team charged with identifying a creative solution to a problem—that is, almost any team in any workplace. My research investigates the connection between mood and creativity. Specifically, I find that a mood of cheerful enthusiasm (pleasant and activated) is best for idea generation. For idea selection, I find that it works best when teams’ mood shifts between calm peace (pleasant and not activated)—a mood that allows giving full consideration to the wacky ideas—and distressed irritability (unpleasant and activated)—which allows weeding out the ideas that are just impractical.

We all know that when we are in a certain mood, be it cheerful or grumpy, it can rub off on the people around us. But as it turns out, influencing others’ moods in this way can have implications for professional output. Consequently, team leaders will want to be upbeat and energetic during the idea generation process. For optimal idea selection, they can create a calm and soothing environment, but keep in mind that being a bit antagonistic (within the bounds of professional behavior) may actually help the process.

Although my research stopped short of evaluating tactics for engineering moods in teams, we can imagine some other techniques that might work. Team leaders might use music to create a mood, choosing exuberant music for an idea-generation session, and switching to calmer music for idea selection. Keeping in mind that it actually seems to pay off to make team members a bit irritable from time to time during this phase of the process—one might experiment a bit with tracks that skip, annoying sounds, or technology snags that actually were planned in advance. Even the food one offers during these sessions might be chosen to affect mood: coffee for activation and herbal tea to soothe?

It can be difficult for teams to transition between the two phases of the process. To address this, leaders might alter the composition of teams, bringing in different team members for the second phase. Or they might allow time to pass between the two phases, so the mood from the first phase doesn’t spill over into the second. My findings thus far offer an intriguing taste of how each of us might manage our own mood on a daily basis depending on the task at hand. I hope that future research will evaluate interventions and offer concrete recommendations for tactics to manage mood.