Organizational Creativity

A while back, I cowrote an article on the psychology of entrepreneurs. My role was to help update the paper that one of my colleagues had written a while before. I took a totally different approach as my background was in international management and communication. Our paper has been well received and still holds up. One reason it may still hold up is that we tried to identify the universals that came out of research regardless of discipline, culture, or methodology. These universals included a high locus of control, high tolerance of ambiguity, a risk taking personality, the ability to rebound after failure, and strong community/familiar support.

So how does that relate to organizational creativity? One of the concepts in the paper that I think was lacking was the creative mind of the entrepreneur. Part of the reason is that few people studied creativity among entrepreneurs is because we assume 1) entrepreneurs are already creative; 2) creativity is subjective and therefore difficult to measure or even observe; 3) business studies need to be “scientific” which means the “soft sciences” such as creativity, communication, innovation, and artistic sense do not have a place in business journals.

Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in research on organizational creativity and innovation. Just in searching “organizational creativity” on google scholar for 2013 (7 months) returned 14,800 hits compared to a total of 58,400 for the time period of 2000-2005 (an average of 11,800 per month). This does not include other concepts that might fall under “creativity” such as knowledge creation, innovation, product/idea development, organizational design, and collective knowledge.

My own research on knowledge creation in distributed groups has recently had me reevaluating my data to answer the following questions:

1) What organizational, departmental, and group processes affect individual creativity and the creativity at all levels of an organization? How do these processes inhibit or encourage innovation and creativity?
2) How do cultural practices (organizational, departmental, academic discipline/professional, societal) inhibit or encourage creativity? How creativity is perceived and/or defined?
3) What design features create the best environment for creativity? What environmental features? What interpersonal/societal/communication features?

I will be focusing on some of my findings about transactional and negotiated knowledge, knowledge boundaries at various levels, and the concept of “design” in organizational practices.

Reading list:

Shin, Soo-Young; Park, Won-Woo; Lim, Hyoun Sook, (2013). What Makes Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises Promote Organizational Creativity: The Contingency Perspective. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal, Volume 41, Number 1, 2013 , pp. 71-82(12).
Anit Somech & Anat Drach-Zahavy (2013). Translating Team Creativity to Innovation Implementation
The Role of Team Composition and Climate for Innovation. Journal of Management. vol. 39 no. 3 684-708.

Cook, S & Yanow, D. (1993). Culture and organizational learning. Journal of Management Inquiry, 2 (4), 373-390.

Goodwin, C. (1994) Professional Vision. American Anthropologist, New Series, 96 (3), 606-633.

Mohammed, S., & Dumville, B. (2001). Team mental models in a team knowledge framework: Expanding theory and measurement across disciplinary boundaries. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22, 89-106.

Rouwette, E. & Vennix, J. (2008). Team learning on messy problems. In Sessa, V. & London, M. (Eds) Work Group Learning (pp. 243-284). New York, NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Moreland, R., & Levine, J. (2001). Socialization in organizations and work groups. In M. E. Turner (Ed.), Groups at work: Theory and research (pp. 69-112). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erbaum Associates.

Jehn, K., Northcraft, G., & Neale, M. (1999). Why differences make a difference: A field study of diversity, conflict, and performance in workgroups. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44, 741-763.