Creativity is an important source of innovation and competitive advantage to organisations.

Have you wondered what makes some people more creative than others? Is there a relationship between when, where and how we choose to work and the creativity we demonstrate at work?
This research project explores the field of flexible working in the COVID environment to look at the relationship between flexible working practices and creativity in the workplace.

How was your experience navigating the mandatory virtual working environment that was enforced on us during the COVID pandemic? What do you think made some people more successful than others in adapting to the sudden requirement to effectively work in a virtual work environment?
Acknowledging the disruption experienced by employees as workplaces responded to the social distancing requirements of the COVID-19 pandemic, the research project also examined the relationship between creativity and adjustment to change.

Join us as we examine the relationship between flexible working and creativity.

At the conclusion of this event, attendees will understand the research methodology used in this project and appreciate the relationship between flexible working practices, creativity and adaptability to covid mandated working from home.

Shekhar, A., Vicary, S., & Geldenhuys, M.

Have you ever felt less than human at work? If so, chances are that you experienced some degree of dehumanisation. Researchers have now created and validated a new single-item pictorial scale that measures blatant dehumanisation. Dehumanisation stems from the social psychology literature and has been found to be experienced by people at work. Measures that currently exist explore subtle forms of dehumanisation at work, while more profound experiences of dehumanisation (i.e. blatant dehumanisation) have been found to be key to understanding the impact of dehumanisation in other contexts. Measures that consider blatant dehumanisation at work are missing and needed to more fully capture the impact of these experiences on worker wellbeing and performance. The newly developed pictorial measure of dehumanisation captures this more profound level of dehumanisation. In doing so it helps create new insights into the ways in which blatant dehumanisation affects people at work.

At the conclusion of this event, attendees will be able to:
- Reflect on the value of pictorial scales as part of surveys.
- Understand the concept of dehumanisation.
- Understand the effectiveness of this scale to measure blatant dehumanisation.

This psych-in-3 presentation discusses our research based on a meta-analysis on the impacts of job demands-resources and job strain on care quality and counter-productive work behaviours in health care settings. The presentation focuses on the superordinate factors that may impact job design by assessing potential differences between the organisational settings of hospitals compared to aged care. Using a meta-analysis, the authors were able to assess the strength of the relationships between job demands, job resources, and job strain on outcomes of quality of care and counter-productive work behaviours and determine whether these relationships were stronger in aged care. We found that it was indeed the case that low job resources and job strain had a stronger, negative relationship with care quality in aged care. This opens up an interesting conversation about the theoretical effect of the market, and devaluation of clientele in aged care and how these supra-ordinate factors may influence work design for front-line staff. These perspectives are fairly new to the field of organisational psychology and marry principles from management literature and sociology into the way organisational psychologists think about work at a macro level.

At the conclusion of this psych-in-3 presentation, attendees should be able to:
• Accurately explain empirical links between job characteristics and care outcomes in hospital and care settings, based on an integration of existing studies.
• Accurately identify theoretical relationships between super-ordinate, field-level factors that may influence work design and worker outcomes in aged care.
• Accurately explain the role of meta-analysis in identifying the moderating impact of setting on the strength of relationships between independent and dependent variables.
• Think critically about the role of key institutional decision-makers and managers in being able to enrich work for those on the front-line in devalued industries through job design.

Overall, this research encourages researchers and practitioners to consider organisational and societal-level solutions to what may previously have been considered an individual-level problem.

Hodroj, Batoul; Way, Kirsten; Wright, April L; Scott, Theresa; and Manchha, Asmita