Group Creativity and Time of the Day

In today’s knowledge-based economies, creativity in higher education has become a central focus for policy-makers. However, developing student creativity is still a challenge for higher education institutions. This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the creative processes at play in educational environments by using an experimental design to explore the time-of-day effect on group creativity. Examining 36 groups of university students, Experiment 1 explored differences in creative performance between morning and afternoon, and the optimal time of day for group creative exercises. Experiment 2 comprised 18 groups, and further studied the effect of chronotype on group creativity in the morning versus the afternoon. In both experiments a significant relationship was found between the timing of the group task and creative performance, with a peak in creative fluency around midday. This research thus points to a significant time of day effect in the creative process in groups.