Patterer et al.: Social Support and Creativity in Coworking Spaces
Summary: Cross-sectional study (N=127) finding that perceived social support from fellow coworkers predicts radical creativity but not incremental creativity directly; the relationship with incremental creativity is moderated by how many days per week the person uses the space.
Sources: raw/patterer-et-al-2026-working-alone-but-together-the-relationship-between-social-support-and-radical-and-incremental.pdf
Last updated: 2026-05-10
Setting: coworking spaces
Coworking spaces — shared offices used by freelancers, remote workers, and independent professionals from different organisations — create an unusual social configuration: proximity without formal interdependence. Members are co-present but not collaborating. Social exchanges are voluntary and self-initiated rather than workflow-prescribed.
Patterer, Schewski, and Kühnel (University of Vienna, Zeitschrift für Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie 2026) recruited 127 coworkers from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland via online questionnaire. Hierarchical linear regression tested direct effects and moderation.
Radical vs. incremental creativity
The study distinguishes two forms of creative performance (after Gilson & Madjar, 2011):
- Radical creativity: transforming or overturning existing approaches — breakthrough novelty
- Incremental creativity: refining, optimizing, or fine-tuning what already exists
This distinction matters because their predictors differ, and conflating them produces misleading conclusions about what “promotes creativity.”
What they found
Social support → radical creativity: positive and significant. Peer community enables the cognitive risk-taking that radical ideas require — even brief, shallow contact suffices.
Social support → incremental creativity: no direct effect. However, the relationship was moderated by extent of coworking (days per week in the space). Workers deeply embedded in the community benefited from social support for incremental work; occasional users did not.
Extraversion as moderator: hypothesised but not supported. Extraversion did not strengthen the social support → creativity relationship.
The moderation pattern
Incremental creativity depends on familiarity and trust more than social support per se. Occasional users can access the radical creative benefit — inspiration and fresh perspective — without deep embeddedness. But improving existing work requires feedback, iteration, and shared context that only build over repeated contact. This mirrors the distinction between weak ties (useful for novelty) and strong ties (useful for refinement).
Connection to the self-leadership study
This paper is part of the same research programme as patterer-self-leadership-remote-work. Together they map a gap in self-regulation research: the 2024 study shows how workers manage themselves across locations; this study shows how the social environment of the workspace shapes creative output. Both find that work location and social embeddedness are not neutral background conditions.