In order to examine the question of the emotional influence of individuals on creativity, I will profile two people who embody positive or negative emotional characteristics that impacted their work situations. I will use my own observations, corroborating those observations with scholarly sources. I will incorporate comments from the employees' colleagues and will use references from the subjects themselves.
My focus will be on non-managerial employees. I do so because in the everyday work arena peers seem to impact empowerment and creativity well or poorly. It is not an area where formal attention is focused unless a situation escalates into a crisis. Clearly managers have substantial impact on the level of worker empowerment and creativity. I will not address that issue, since attention is paid to it frequently in the literature (Hochschild, 1983; Kreitzer, 1997; Lerner, 1986; Stirrat, 1995). In addition, for purposes of the above question, managers are often equated with the organization, as though they and the organization were one. Therefore, a look at how individuals influence a system may be seen more clearly though non-managerial examples.