120 Chapter 5 METHOD Procedure and Participants Data collection took place in Germany. The sample consisted of 62 employees from 13 creative agencies in northern Germany, ranging in size from small ones (< 10 employees) to some bigger ones with approximately 50 employees. Work tasks of the participants ranged fromactivities such as designingmagazine layouts, advertisements, commercials, and webpages, to counseling services for customers (suggesting and conceptualizing creative design solutions, such as advertising campaigns) and administrative tasks. The agencies were approached by a graduate student via phone or e-mail with information about the study and the request for their participation. To encourage participation, the creative agencies were offered to receive a data report after completion of the study. Data was collected online, using the Questback platform. Participants received daily links to the surveys via e-mail, which they could fill out via their smartphone or computer. They were instructed to fill in the surveys each day between 6 pm and 12 pm. To be able to match their daily entries, participants filled out a predefined code in each survey. Which supervisor would be most suitable to rate which employee – i.e., in terms of how closely they worked together – was discussed prior to the study. The creative performance ratings of the supervisors were matched with the employee data with the use of the same predefined codes provided to the supervisors by the participating employees. Of the total sample, 58.1% were female. On average, participants were 32.9 years old (SD = 9.3) and had 10.3 years of work experience (SD = 9.3). Of the participants, 50% had obtained a middle or high school degree, whereas the other 50% had finished college or university. The majority of the sample held a permanent position (72.6%) as opposed to a temporary contract. Participants were asked to fill out the daily surveys at the end of each workday throughout the course of one typical work week. In total, the 62 participants filled out 232 daily surveys (3.74 on average). Through means of the personal code participants filled in at the beginning of each survey, we were able to match their daily responses. In case there was no pre-existing German version of the measurement instruments available, we translated the items to German using back-translation.
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