The Impact of Work Environment on Employees’

Creativity in Saudi Arabia

Abstract:

This paper aims at studying the influence of work environment on enhancing or stifling
creativity of the employees’ performance. The sample of this study will be taken from
Al-Baik Chicken fast-food restaurant, which is known of having the most efficient staff in
the private sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Conducting personal interviews for 25 employees of Al-Baik followed by content analysis

of the data collected was used to measure the major characteristics that contribute to
the development or inhibition of employees’ creativity. The final results of this study
are compared and analyzed against data of previous studies to check the similarity level
between similar studied conducted in different contexts.

Introduction:

It is quite noticeable that in most international and big companies worldwide, there has
been a significantly increasing interest in how to get their employees more creative as
this seems to be congruent with how much successful they want to be. This can largely
be due to the rapid pace of change and the high level of competition among big
businesses nowadays (Emls De Alencar, 1997). To this end, this paper is trying to look
into some of the factors that can either promote or inhibit creativity within a certain
work environment. However, such an interest is just starting to gain a little bit of
popularity here in Saudi Arabia, unlike some other countries like the USA and the UK
where the concept of creativity in a work place has been a hot topic for discussion and
investigation for a long time (Isaksen, Murdock, Firestien, and Treffinger,1993). Despite
the broad recognition of how significant creativity should be at work, very little data has
been obtained to measure how creativity can be promoted or stifled in a certain
business environment. Thus, this study was driven by the lack of data of this topic in
Saudi Arabia with the aim of investigating the major factors that enhance or inhibit
creativity in the work environment.