Daydreaming at work could carry ‘significant creative benefits’, research suggests

Employees who allow their minds to wander may find they can crack difficult challenges in new ways, writes Harry Cockburn

Daydreaming can boost employees creativity in some scenarios, researchers say (Getty )

While it may be the scourge of managers everywhere, employees with a propensity for daydreaming and allowing their minds to wander may actually reap “significant creative benefits”, new research suggests.

However, the study warns that for any true gains, those with their heads in the clouds must be engaged in the right kind of daydreaming.

A research team from Washington University in St Louis and Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile found that daydreaming carried creative benefits for those who identified with their profession and cared for the work they did.

They cautioned that when an individual was not compelled by the problems and challenges of their job, daydreaming could impair performance as their minds became lost in unrelated thoughts.

“Daydreaming can have significant upsides for one’s tendency to crack difficult challenges in new ways,” said Markus Baer, professor of organisational behaviour at Washington University’s Olin Business School.

“This, however, presumes that people deeply care about the work they do.”

He added: “Daydreaming without this focus has significant downsides, which show up most directly in one’s overall performance ratings.”

The study authors said their work “opens new windows into the power of the mind” and that the project “depicts daydreaming as a critical mechanism accounting for the connection between the type of work people do and the level of creativity they exhibit on the job”.

But they said the term “daydreaming” should not be confused with being distracted or multitasking. Rather, the process at the heart of this study involved thoughts becoming disconnected from a task or “stimulus environment”.

The authors found that people whose minders wandered produced work that was highly creative and not universally counterproductive, as often assumed in the business world.

The research team identified and studied two types of daydreaming in particular. They described these as “problem-oriented daydreams”, which they said took the form of imaginative thoughts loosely connected to one’s challenges; and “bizarre daydreams”, which they said were characterised by thoughts not linked to existing challenges or problems at all but rather improbable possibilities.

The researchers said these bizarre thoughts usually involved scenarios which “might delight a writer of fantasy or science fiction”.

But they found even these wacky flights of fancy were not always mere mental escapism. Instead, they said, those workers who were psychologically attached to their profession and who “gain a sense of self from their job” were those who experienced creativity-boosting daydreaming.

“When they perform cognitively demanding work, gathering both enjoyment and fulfillment from that work, their daydreams spark imaginative thoughts around the job’s tasks and problems,” the authors said.

The researchers conducted two separate studies. The first examined the experiences of 169 professionals in a spectrum of industries, and the second was a study of 117 professional employees and their 46 supervisors.

Both studies were conducted in South America, and the research participants averaged 34 and 36 years old, respectively.

In their results, the researchers distinguished between creativity and job performance.

“Conducting two different studies enabled us to test our hypotheses across a wide range of workers and triangulate our findings,” Washington University’s Erik Dane said. “The methods and measures we adopted integrated cutting-edge techniques associated with studying creativity and daydreaming alike.”

In the first study, workers across a wide range of businesses, though mainly service (26 per cent) and banking or commerce (22 per cent), provided daily, diary-like ratings of the job challenges which arose and also their minds’ tendency to engage in the two types of daydreaming. Workers also rated the extent to which they generated new ideas and solutions during the day.

The second study involved employees across three technology consulting companies, where creativity and problem-solving were key features of the job, and where employees tended to identify strongly with their profession and its attendant values and challenges. This time, the authors also asked supervisors at those companies to rate their employees’ creativity.

Workers were significantly more likely to daydream when they confronted tricky problems and new challenges in their work. And these daydreams, in turn, reliably boosted people’s creativity, at least for “professionally identified” workers.

As long as employees’ identification with their profession was present, the researchers discovered both problem-oriented and bizarre daydreaming had virtually no impact on performance, neither positive nor negative. However, when professional identification was lacking, daydreaming was found to compromise performance.

“What this means is that daydreaming can boost creativity but does little to kill it. On the flip side, daydreaming does little to improve overall performance but can significantly reduce it,” Hector Madrid of Pontificia Universidad said.

The research team concluded that “most businesses could benefit from taking steps to remove the stigma around daydreaming at work”.

The authors noted previous studies indicated that the mind wanders for close to half of the day, so it is unreasonable to assume it can stay on task continuously.

“At the very least, perhaps we shouldn’t shun workers for getting lost in their thoughts and dreams,” they said. “There might just be a new idea in there.”

The research is published in the Academy of Management Journal.