Do you love your work or hate it? Or do you have mixed feelings?

If it’s mixed feelings, chances are you are more creative - and by implication, you’ll do better - according to a new study.

The study from University of Washington business school found that people who are emotionally ambivalent - the ones who simultaneously feel positive and negative emotions – tend to be more creative in the workplace than those who feel just happy or sad, or who lack any emotion.

Assistant professor Christine Ting Fong conducted a series of experiments where she found that people who have mixed emotions take it as a signal that they are in a situation that might contain lots of unusual associations, and therefore respond by being more creative and lateral.

The study also has implications for how you progress in your career. It found that women in supervisory positions were more likely to be emotionally ambivalent than women lower down the food chain, and women in high-status positions were more creative managers.

If the study is right, the implications for employers could be important. Does it mean, for example, that they have to create weird workplaces?

Fong says: “Due to the complexity of many organisations, workplace experiences often elicit mixed emotions from employees, and it’s often assumed that mixed emotions are bad for workers and companies. Rather than assuming ambivalence will lead to negative results for the organization, managers should recognize that emotional ambivalence can have positive consequences that can be leveraged for organizational success.”

I am not sure it means companies need to create odd working environments.

Still, to my way of thinking, this sort of study just confirms something about the way we are. Working life really teeters on a fulcrum of ambivalence. Do you save or spend it all now? Is it better to be part of a team or do you want to stand out from the crowd and achieve it yourself? People who can see the both sides of the equation, and who can take the good with the bad, would be more creative.

But then, I’ve come across lots of managers who are about as creative as a toilet seat. And lots of creative people who are totally happy, or totally sad. Nothing ambivalent about them.

How do you feel about your work? How do you respond to the peaks and troughs? And has being ambivalent got you anywhere?

So how do you feel about your work? Does it drive you up the twist one day, and then you feel ok about it the next? Do you give a toss? And if you don’t, has it helped you?