Breaching the class ceiling creatively

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – In their 2019 book “The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged”, British sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison examined what they call a ‘class pay gap’ where “even when those from working-class backgrounds make it into prestigious jobs, they earn, on average, 16 percent less than colleagues from privileged backgrounds”. That holds true even if two people graduated with the same degree from the same university and got hired for the same job; the one with the privileged background is more likely to get promoted and earn more.

In a recent research paper on childhood socioeconomic status (SES) and creativity at the workplace, SMU PhD candidate Hye Jung Eun argues that those from lower childhood SES suffer from lower creativity that hurts their advancement in adult life.

Eun and her collaborators studied 440 working professionals in India that were from 72 teams ranging from six to ten members across various industries. Team members and leaders were asked to rate each member’s creativity, and from these scores, a single creativity score was derived for each team member.

“We distributed the survey to leaders and team members, and we asked them to list down the team members’ names and indicate how creative they think each team member is, as well as how novel and useful each member's ideas are,” Eun tells the Office of Research and Tech Transfer of her research, for which she collaborated with SMU Associate Professors of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources Marko Pitesa and Roy Chua. “Novelty and usefulness are the two dimensions of creativity. So we use these questions on everyone to rate each team member's creativity.”

To measure their childhood SES, participants answered the following questions:

· “My family had enough money to buy things I wanted.”

· “My family didn’t worry too much about paying our bills.”

· “I felt relatively wealthy compared to the other kids in my school.”

“Those raised in a higher childhood SES tend to be rated by other team members and leaders as more creative,” says Eun, who recently became the only recipient of the Samsung Economic Research Institute Scholarship Award outside of the U.S. this year. “They are also more likely to be promoted and receive salary increments from leaders’ ratings, and that shows that creativity can explain the class ceiling phenomenon.

“Those who grew up in a poorer environment are less likely to receive promotions and salary increments, and their lower level of creativity performance can explain why they progress more slowly in terms of career advancements.”

The barrier to creativity… and overcoming it

Eun points to research literature that shows that those from lower childhood SES are less likely to interact with others who are different from them.

“When we are talking about people of lower SES interacting less with different others, we’re not only talking about those from a different SES. We’re also talking about things such as gender, nationality, race, ethnicity, and age group,” she explains. “Those who grew up in poorer backgrounds are socialised to have limited social interactions. They tend to be more focused on interacting with others who are similar because dissimilarity and unpredictability may represent threats under circumstances where economic resources are lacking.”

She adds:

“Coming from lower childhood SES can be experienced as a negative identity, so it can interfere with one’s cognitive ability to process and harness the benefit from such new stimuli when they are interacting with others who are different from themselves.

Research also shows that those who grew up in poorer backgrounds tend to have a lower level of openness to new ideas. So even if they have diverse interactions with others, they don't get as much benefits from such social interactions to increase their creativity.”

For managers at business units, this could represent a potential pool of creativity that could be unlocked. “This is not only a social issue, it's an economic and business issue because if a group of employees cannot realise their best potential for the organisations, then it's also a loss for organisations as well.

“What we propose in our study is that employers can devise psychological interventions so that employees are less focused on those salient demographic differences among themselves. They can focus on building organisational identification among employees so that they might be more comfortable interacting with others who are different. It could benefit their creativity.”

Breaking the class ceiling at an early age

While interventions are possible to make salient demographic differences in adulthood less so, Eun stresses the unique opportunity parents have to increase their children’s ability to socialise with a wide range of people from an early age.

“Social behaviour learnt in childhood tends to persist into adulthood,” she explains. “Creativity is not something completely new. It arises from a combination of existing ideas, and that is why it’s important to be exposed to diverse resources.

 “If they develop the habit of being comfortable talking to people who are dissimilar to them when they are young rather than waiting until they are working professionals, this habit tends to carry into their adult years.”

Back to Research@SMU May 2020 Issue