Spilling Outside the Box: The Effects of Individuals’ Creative Behaviors at Work on Time Spent with their Spouses at Home

Most research on creativity describes it as a net positive: producing new products for the organization and satisfaction and positive affect for creative workers. However, a host of anecdotal and historical evidence suggests that creative work can have deleterious consequences for relationships. This raises the question: how does creativity at work impact relationships at home? Relying on work-family conflict and resource allocation theory as conceptual frameworks, we test a model of creative behaviors during the day at work and the extent to which employees spend time with their spouses at home in the evening, using 685 daily matched responses from 108 worker-spouse pairings. Our results reveal that variance-focused creative behaviors (problem identification, information searching, idea generation) predict less time spent with a spouse at home. In contrast, selection-focused creative behaviors (idea validation) predict more time spent with a spouse. Further, openness to experience moderates these relationships. Overall, the results raise questions about the possible relational costs of creative behaviors at work on life at home.