Tag Archives: creativity

Is Bureaucracy Bad for Creativity? That Depends on You

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Topic: Creativity, Strategic HR, Teams
Publication: Academy of Management Journal
Article: How does bureaucracy impact individual creativity? A cross-level investigation of team contextual influences on goal orientation-creativity relationships
Authors: Giles Hirst, Daan Van Knippenberg, Chin-Hui Chen, & Claudia A. Sacramento
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman

Bureaucracy and creativity. They might seem like mortal enemies—we often think of red tape and paper work as the killer of creative thinking—but it doesn’t have to be! Really, it depends on your employees. When we talk about goal orientation (why people do what they do), we usually take about three types of people. First, you have your learning-oriented workers. These are the ones who do what they do for sheer enjoyment of the work. They are intrinsically motivated. Second, you have your performance-prove-oriented employees. These workers want to show you how good they are. Third and finally, you have your performance-avoid workers. These are your risk-adverse employees—the rule followers. They all respond to bureaucracy differently, particularly when it comes to creativity.

We can divide bureaucracy into two dimensions—centralization and formalization. Centralization deals with the amount of decision making ability team members have. The more centralized decision making is, the less team members have opportunity to add their input. Formalization deals with the paperwork. It’s the policies and procedures employees have to adhere to in their job. Like centralization, the more formal the procedure, the less wiggle-room there is for workers.

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Creativity at Work…Through Increased Workplace Structure?

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Topic: Creativity, Strategic HR, Stress
Publication: Human Resource Management (NOV/DEC 2010)
Article: Does Structuring of Human Resource Management Process Enhance Employee Creativity? The Mediating Role of Psychological Availability
Authors: G. Binyamin, A. Carmeli
Reviewed By: Lauren A. Wood

The environment of the modern workplace is increasingly becoming more dynamic and unstable leading employees to perceive high levels of work-related stress. To battle this increased uncertainty in the external environment and provide a sense of stability to employees, organizations are looking internally at the way human resources processes are designed. Structuring of HRM processes consists of 7 essential dimensions: strategic alignment with organizational goals, managerial engagement, employee job functions structured and evaluated based on a job analysis, clarity of HRM policies and evaluation criteria, planning, flexibility, and internal consistency or synergy of all processes. Structuring HR around these 7 dimensions was shown to help alleviate employee stress perceptions by decreasing feelings of uncertainty.    

Despite these positive outcomes, intuitively, it seems that by providing a structured work place, employee creativity (an indispensable factor for knowledge work) would decrease. However, as the authors of the current study show, this does not appear to be the case – because structuring HRM processes around the 7 dimensions decreased perceived employee stress and uncertainty, employees’ psychological availability (psychological recourses an employee can allocate to a given situation) was freed-up, allowing room for higher-order cogitative processes like creativity.

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Task Conflict, Team Creativity and…Goldilocks?

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Topic: Conflict, Creativity
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (AUG 2010)
Article: Task conflict and team creativity: A question of how much and when
Authors: Farh, J. L., Lee, C., & Farh, C. I.
Reviewed By: Bobby Bullock

The concept of team creativity has become more and more salient in recent years due to an increasing reliance on teams to enhance an organization’s competitiveness.  Team creativity is defined as the creation of new and helpful ideas concerning services, procedures, products, and processes by a team of individuals.  So while, yes, we all want our teams to be creative, what environmental factors will encourage this? 

Searching for such factors, Farh, Lee, and Farh (2010) set out to examine the roles that task conflict (or conflict about policies, procedures, decisions, interpretation of facts, and the distribution of resources) and the phase of a project team’s lifecycle (i.e., team formation, mid-point, and project deadline) have in determining team creativity.

Consistent with previous findings, Farh et al. (2010) found that there is a curvilinear relationship between task conflict and team creativity, meaning that when task conflict was extremely low or extremely high, team creativity was at its lowest, and moderate amounts of task conflict were linked with the highest amounts of team creativity.  This supports the ‘Goldilocksian’ idea that too much disagreement and team members may become frustrated or lose sight of the group’s main goal, while too little disagreement could lead to groupthink and complacency.  However, ‘just the right’ amount of disagreement can expose members to new ideas and stimulate divergent thinking! 

Farh et al. (2010) also found that project team lifecycle interacted with task conflict to produce creative outcomes.  Their findings indicate that the curvilinear relationship was only present at the early phase of a team’s lifecycle.  This means that, as project teams near their deadline, task conflict will cease to produce creative solutions.  They theorized that this is due to a team’s inability to change course or incorporate new ideas when they are nearing their deadlines. 

The implications to this research are valuable for any organization that wishes to get the most from their project teams:

  • Managers or team leaders should not discourage conflict based on ideas, decisions, etc…  In fact, if they encourage some level of task conflict, they can expect their teams to come up with more creative solutions through the dissemination of more ideas and divergent thinking.
  • Task conflict should be embraced particularly at the early phases of a team project, when members are defining/refining objectives and planning a course of to attain those objectives.
  • According to Farh et al. (2010), managers should also “build a psychologically safe team climate early on in the project, so that team members feel safe to bring up ideas that may be counter to the majority opinion,” (pp. 6-7). 

With all this said, it’s important for managers to keep in mind that too much task conflict and too many arguments can shift a team towards relationship conflicts, frustration and lack of productivity!  Just like  that old story with the blond girl, the three bears and the porridge!

Farh, J. L., Lee, C., & Farh, C. I. (2010). Task conflict and team creativity: A question of how much and when. Journal of Applied Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1037/a0020015

Cheated Employees: Less Organizational Commitment and Less Creativity

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Topic: Fairness Organizational Commitment Creativity
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (July, 2010)
Article: Psychological Contract Breaches, Organizational Commitment, and Innovation-Related Behaviors: A Latent Growth Modeling Approach
Authors: T.W.H. Ng, D.C. Feldman, S.S.K. Lam
Reviewed By: Ben Sher

Okay, here’s the deal. Employees make assumptions about what they owe their employers and what their employers owe them in return. This is called a psychological contract. According to Ng, Feldman, and Lam (2010), when employees think this psychological contract is being violated, they may feel less organizational commitment and become less innovative.

So what does happen when employees feel bamboozled? According to the authors, two things happen. First, employees will naturally begin to feel less emotional attachment to the company. This is not revenge; it’s just an inevitable emotional reaction. Secondly, employees will indeed have some interest in getting back at the employer as long as they can keep their jobs.

That sounds ominous. So, what do the employees do about it? Basically, they become less creative. The authors explain that there are two ways an employee can be creative on the job. Employees can solve problems and they can implement ideas. Problem solving is difficult to measure, so instead the authors measured idea implementation. They defined this as anytime an employee shared a new idea with a colleague or superior, or anytime an employee either worked to implement those new ideas or helped others to implement them. When employees perceived psychological breaches, they ended up engaging in less of these innovative behaviors. Because the study included employees from a wide variety of jobs, the authors concluded that the complexity of the job makes no difference, and innovation will always suffer.

A key finding of this study is that this decrease in innovation continued over time. Employers may mistakenly think that breaking psychological contracts won’t have lasting consequences and that employees will eventually forgive and forget. This is a mistake. Because the authors were able to identify the role psychological contract breaches have in reducing organizational commitment, or the overall attitude employees have towards their employers, it is easy to understand how innovation will continue to decrease over the long run. Employers should be warned of these consequences, and should be encouraged to fix the situation and give employees what they believe they are owed.

Ng, T.W.H., & Feldman, D.C., & Lam, S.S.K. (2010). Psychological Contract Breaches, Organizational Commitment, and Innovation-Related Behaviors: A Latent Growth Modeling Approach. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95, 744-751.

Hands-on practice increases creativity in teams

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Topic: Creativity, Teams
Publication: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (MAR 2010) Article: First, get your feet wet: The effects of learning from direct and indirect experience on team creativity
Authors: F. Gino, L. Argote, E. Miron-Spektor, G. Todorova
Reviewed By: Jared Ferrell

It is a widely accepted fact that experience leads to creativity, but the question posited by the authors in this study was whether a certain type of experience leads to more creativity. This study focused on differences in team creativity between teams who had direct task experience (learning by doing), indirect task experience (vicarious learning), or no task experience.

The authors found that teams with direct and indirect experience were more creative than teams with no task experience.  They also found that teams with direct task experience were significantly more creative than teams who had indirect task experience.  This gives evidence that learning by observing others is not the optimal way to instill creativity in employees.

The authors suggest that this may happen because people with indirect task experience do not fully understand the whole process behind why something was done or what other possible solutions there were to a certain problem; things upon which those with direct task experience would have a better grasp.

The authors also emphasize a practical example; organizations who outsource R&D may also be experiencing hidden costs to creativity that occur due to the outsourced R&D teams not having direct task experience that domestic teams would have.  Clearly, these results have serious practical implications for organizations that are looking to assemble creative teams.

Gino, F., Argote, L., Miron-Spektor, E., & Todorova, G. (2010). First, get your feet wet: The effects of learning from direct and indirect experience on team creativity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 111(2), 102-115.

Lead to inspire creativity and innovation. Gandhi did it – how hard can it be?

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Topic: Creativity, Leadership
Publication: Journal of Business Research (APR 2009)
Article: Transformational leadership, creativity, and organizational innovation
Authors: L. Gumusluolu, A.Llseve
Reviewed by: Lit Digger

Although Gandhi had passed away before the idea of transformational leadership was academically introduced by Burns in 1978, Gandhi’s life and work exemplified transformational leadership.  Transformational leaders:

·      Demonstrate charisma
·   Build relationships with their followers
·   Express a vision for the future
·   Inspire and encourage their followers to reach big-picture goals
·   Intellectually stimulate their followers. 

Such leaders enable followers to achieve what might otherwise be viewed as impossible.  Gandhi effectively did all of these things.

If Gandhi was leading your company today, is it likely that he could also inspire creativity and innovation?  Yes . . . simply by using his same transformational leadership style.

Gumusluoglu and Ilsev (2009) recently conducted the first study that examined multiple organizational levels while evaluating transformational leadership’s effect on employee creativity.  Their sample included employees within numerous small Turkish organizations specializing in software development.

Gumusluoglu and Ilsev supported the link between transformational leadership and individual-level creativity.  Transformational leaders build their employees’ self-confidence, enable employees to identify with their company’s vision, and encourage their employees to think in new ways. 

Importantly, the authors found that psychological empowerment plays a role in this relationship.  When employees feel psychologically empowered by their transformational leader, they also exhibit a greater sense of autonomy that naturally leads to creative thought. 

On the flip side, Gumusluoglu and Ilsev found that transformational leadership is less likely to result in employee creativity when it does not involve the psychological empowerment of followers.

Findings also supported the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational-level innovation.  Interestingly, the innovation measure captured the organization’s innovative activity as well as the returns the organization saw from those innovations.  How thoughtful to include money in this outcome measure.

So, what’s the take-away?  If you’re leading a company that relies on creativity and innovation for bottom-line profit, perhaps you should consider adopting a transformational leadership style.  If you empower your employees, this will encourage them to make calls on their own and think outside of the box.  We can’t ALL be Gandhis, of course, but we CAN learn from his example to inspire others in new ways.

Gumusluoglu, L., Ilsev, A. (2009). Transformational leadership, creativity, and

organizational innovation. Journal of Business Research, 62, 461-473.

Creativity by Committee

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Topic: Creativity
Publication: Academy of Management Journal (APR 2009)
Article: A cross-level perspective on employee creativity: goal orientation, team learning behavior, and individual creativity
Authors: G. Hirst, D. Van Kippenberg and J. Zhou
Reviewed by: Katie Bachman

In most cases, employee creativity is as much of a necessity for companies as competent management or copy machines—it’s the only way business can get done. New research has evaluated the impact of work climate on employee creativity and the results have some interesting implications for organizations.

According to this research, team-level learning behavior (i.e. the encouragement of learning, exploring, and innovating) is crucial for creative expression by members at an individual level. For employees who already have a learning orientation, teams that encourage learning and creative expression gain a lot over teams that have low levels of learning behavior. Even for employees with an approach performance orientation, (i.e., individuals who are motivated by achieving good performance on external indicators of knowledge or skill) team learning behavior encourages people to be creative so as to show themselves in a positive light. The only situation in which creative performance remains stable over different levels of team learning behavior is for those with a performance avoidant orientation (i.e., individuals who are motivated by avoiding poor performance on external indicators of knowledge or skill). These employees are unlikely to innovate because they will not want to show weakness or uncertainty.

Learning behaviors can be supported at higher organization levels and trickle down to the worker. For managers, this research means that encouraging team learning behaviors helps most employees and won’t hurt anyone. So, let the brainstorming begin!

Hirst, G., Van Knippenberg, D., & Zhou, J. (2009). A cross-level perspective on employee creativity: goal orientation, team learning behavior, and individual creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 52, 280-293.