Organizational climate for creativity and innovation

Abstract

This article describes an instrument for measuring organizational structure and climate for creativity and innovation. Its application and validation in organizational settings is also described. Recommendations are made for using the instrument to develop interventions to promote organizational innovation.     

Leadership,creativity and innovation: a meta-analytic review

ABSTRACT

This paper reports the most comprehensive meta-analytic examination of the relationship between leadership and both followers’ creative and innovative performance. Specifically, we examined 13 leadership variables (transformational, transactional, ethical, humble, leader-member exchange, benevolent, authoritarian, entrepreneurial, authentic, servant, empowering, supportive, and destructive) using data from 266 studies. In addition to providing robustly estimated correlations, we explore two theoretically and pragmatically important issues: the relative importance of the different leadership constructs and moderators of the relationship between leadership and employee creativity and innovation. Regrading creative performance, authentic, empowering, and entrepreneurial leadership demonstrated the strongest relationships. For innovative performance, both transactional (contingent reward) and supportive leadership appear particularly relevant. The current study synthesizes an important, burgeoning, diverse body of research, and in doing so, generates nuanced evidence that can be used to guide theoretical advancements, improved research designs, and up-to-date policy recommendations regarding leading for creativity, and innovation.     

The management of innovation: Recasting the role of creativity

Abstract

This article examines difficulties arising from the deep-rooted assumption that the innovation process exists as a phenomenon incorporating two distinct and identifiable stages of creative discovery and subsequent implementation. An alternative perspective is proposed in which innovation is represented as the process whereby individuals enact new social procedures; creativity is the associated process in which the meanings of the enactments are discovered and labelled. Innovation treated in this manner occurs as the streams of human activities and ideas mutually interact. The starting, ending, and bounding of an innovation project are all parts of a unitary process of meaning-creation within social contexts. “Creative” thoughts and actions interact throughout the process. (“Creativity through the finishing line”; “implementation first and last”). Not least, such an interpretive model avoids the difficulties that have been encountered in attempts to treat innovation as a series of objective stages. It furthermore provides a coherent theoretical status for creativity as the meaning-creating processes within all personal discovery and learning activities.     

Moderating effect of Zhong Yong on the relationship between creativity and innovation behaviour

The present study examined the moderating effect of Zhong Yong on the relationship between perceived creativity and innovation behaviour in Chinese companies. A total of 273 paired questionnaires were collected with employee self-rated creativity and Zhong Yong and supervisor-rated innovation behaviour. The results show that for people higher on Zhong Yong, their creativity was not correlated with innovation behaviour; for people less immersed in Zhong Yong, this correlation is significant. This finding provides a new insight into the effects of Zhong Yong on the creativity-innovation behaviour transformation processes. The implications for future research are also discussed.     

Climate for work group creativity and innovation: Norwegian validation of the team climate inventory (TCI)

The present study assessed the psychometric properties and the validity of the Norwegian translation of the Team Climate Inventory (TCI). The TCI is a measure of climate for innovation within groups at work and is based on the four-factor theory of climate for innovation (West, 1990). Cronbach's alpha revealed satisfactory reliabilities and exploratory factor analysis successfully extracted the four original factors as well as a fifth factor that has also been reported in other studies (N = 195 teams from a wide range of professions). Results from confirmatory factor analysis, using a different sample (N = 106 teams from the Norwegian public postal service), suggested that the five-factor solution had the most parsimonious fit. Criterion validity was explored by correlating TCI scores from 92 post offices and 395 postal distribution teams with customer satisfaction scores. Significant positive relationships were found between three of four TCI scales and customer satisfaction.     

Building blocks of idea generation and implementation in teams: A meta-analysis of team design and team creativity and innovation

Although organizations increasingly rely on teams to innovate, little systematic knowledge exists about how to design teams to do so. Building on the model of collaborative creativity and innovation and synthesizing findings from published and unpublished studies, this meta-analysis examines the role of team design on team creativity and innovation. We used random-effects meta-analysis to cumulate the correlations between different features of team design and team creativity or team innovation from 134 field studies representing 11,353 teams and 35 studies representing 2,485 student teams. We found that team tenure is curvilinearly related, autonomy-supportive leadership, task interdependence, and goal interdependence are positively related, and demographic diversity and team size are unrelated to team creativity and innovation. Examining meta-analytic path models, we found that task interdependence and supportive leadership positively relate to team creativity and innovation via team collaboration and team potency. In accounting for the literature, we found a dearth of studies examining team processes, some types of diversity such as racial diversity, and the role of team member turnover. We conclude by providing directions for future research and practical guidance about increasing team creativity and innovation through team design.     

Narrowing the creativity gap: the moderating effects of perceived support for creativity

This article examines the role of 3 types of perceived support for creativity in moderating the relation between creative self-efficacy and self-perceived creativity. The findings suggest significant interaction effects for perceived work-group support and supervisor support, but not for perceived organizational support. This study is among the first to (a) examine the importance of perceived support for creativity in unlocking creative potential and increasing creativity in organizations and (b) use interaction terms in structural equation modeling (SEM) to investigate moderator effects in an applied research setting. These results imply that organizational interventions focused on training supervisors and work-group members to support creativity in the workplace may be more effective than broader and less focused interventions at the organizational level.     

Perceptual symbols of creativity: Coldness elicits referential,warmth elicits relational creativity

Research in the cognitive and social psychological science has revealed the pervading relation between body and mind. Physical warmth leads people to perceive others as psychological closer to them and to be more generous towards others. More recently, physical warmth has also been implicated in the processing of information, specifically through perceiving relationships (via physical warmth) and contrasting from others (via coldness). In addition, social psychological work has linked social cues (such as mimicry and power cues) to creative performance. The present work integrates these two literatures, by providing an embodied model of creative performance through relational (warm = relational) and referential (cold = distant) processing. The authors predict and find that warm cues lead to greater creativity when 1) creating drawings, 2) categorizing objects, and 3) coming up with gifts for others. In contrast, cold cues lead to greater creativity, when 1) breaking set in a metaphor recognition task, 2) coming up with new pasta names, and 3) being abstract in coming up with gifts. Effects are found across different populations and age groups. The authors report implications for theory and discuss limitations of the present work.     

Societal creativity: Problems with pathology

Abstract

This commentary on Simonton's “Political Pathology and Societal Creativity” argues that although the article offers a comprehensive and illuminating account of possible connections between societal creativity and political phenomena, viewing such connections in terms of a relationship between creativity and political pathology is problematic. The notion of political pathology presupposes some notion of political health, yet no standard of political health is offered by Simonton, nor are we given any criteria for determining whether certain social phenomena are pathological. Ultimately the notion of what constitutes a healthy society rests upon views about the nature of society which depend on a political philosophy. The danger in talk of political pathology lies in defining political health in terms of a particular political ideology, thereby making a value judgment regarding political ideals hidden in the guise of a strictly empirical claim.     

Rethinking creativity

John S. Dacey. Fundamentals of Creative Thinking. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, Division of D.C. Heath, 1989, 314 pp., $39.00 hardcover, ISBN 0–669–16140–30.     

Cognitive pathways of team climate for creativity: Implications for member creativity and job performance

ABSTRACT

The present study examines the contextual effects of team climate for creativity on creative behavior and job performance of employees. Drawing on the team-knowledge management perspective, we identify team-learning orientation and collective problem solving as main intermediate cognitive processes. The results, based on 856 employees across 102 work units of a high-tech company, demonstrate that these 2 team-level cognitive processes mediate the cross-level effects of team climate for creativity on creative behavior and job performance. This study reveals the cognitive ramifications of team climate for creativity as a favorable social context for employee creativity. By highlighting the cognitive process activated by team climate for creativity, this work complements existing studies focusing mostly on the affective and motivational mechanisms that underlie the team context–creativity relationship.     

Measurement of creativity: review and critique

Presently available criteria of creativity are reviewed and classified into ten categories: tests of divergent thinking, attitude and interest inventories, personality inventories, biographical inventories, teacher nominations, peer nominations, supervisor ratings, judgments of products, eminence and self-reported creative activities and achievements. These techniques for measuring creativity are then criticized in terms of their reliability, discriminant validity, dimensionality and convergent validity. It is concluded that an inventory of self-reported creative activities and accomplishments is the most defensible technique for selecting creative individuals.     

A child's story: Recovering through creativity

Journal of Child and Family Studies -