The misinterpretation of organizational creativity: Errors in problem definition

A. Raharso

ISEAD, Singapore

ABSTRACT: Prevailing views of organizational creativity are that organizations need to intervene to enhance individual creativity by adopting structures and practices that facilitate innovation.

1 INTRODUCTION

For the better half of the last century, management theorists have researched on the topic of facilitating creativity in organizations (Drazin et al. 1999, Ford 1996, Mumford & Gustafson 1988, Sternberg 1999, Summers & White 1976, Unsworth 2001, Woodman et al. 1993). Researchers have tried to find answers to why certain individuals, teams or organizations are more likely than others to formulate novel and useful ideas, processes and products (Amabile 1996). It is a matter of concern that despite the pleth­ora of research in this field, researchers are still look­ing for solutions to address the management’s call for the lack of employee creativity. Our main argu­ment is that the discussion on creativity models, mediators and enhancers of organizational creativity, although well-intentioned, has been incorrectly framed. Instead, we propose that employee creativity is present and given in organizations; it is the organ­izations which are structurally and organically designed to not tap into the employee’s creative potential or enhance creativity. Studies of creativity appear to take the perspective or bias of organiza­tions trying to facilitate creativity in which it is pre­sumed creativity channels in employees are defunct and need management intervention in the form of creativity training for innovation in the organization.

Our starting point is that much of this ‘creativity imperative’ has developed within a largely uncritical vacuum, in which the notion of ‘creativity’ and ‘cre­ative employees’ itself has been assumed to be distinct and insufficiently found in organization. Cre­ativity has often appeared only with reference to the business creativity which is defined by creativity for the sake of achievement of organizational goals within a very narrow focus. As organizations are grappling to gain a foothold in their respective indus­tries, they have come to blame the non- achievement of targets and the innovation gap on a lack of cre­ativity among their employees to come up with unique and targeted solutions. Many research papers claim that management can take steps to promote a creativity stimulating climate (Gaspersz 2005). As a result of this research, organizations create structures and models to enhance creativity; creativity training programmes are set up with the intention to fast­track the process of getting creative ideas. This paper explores the utility of these concepts of cre­ativity enhancement in the form of trainings etc. and aims to assert why creativity in its original sense of understanding is inconsistent with organizations whose primary purpose is making money, and whose primary mode is working through rules and institu­tionalised practice (Gahan et al. 2007).

Our central argument is that the meaning and expectation of creativity has been restricted by the demands on business creativity by the organizations. We argue that creative employees exist in abundance in organizations but the pressure within organiza­tions to align personal creativity with organization’s goal is creating an organizational bias in the under­standing of creativity and what leads to innovation.

2 THE CONCEPT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY

2.1 Definition and models of creativity

Creativity in the workplace is defined as the produc­tion of new ideas about products, services, processes, and procedures that are useful to organizations (Ama- bile et al.

environment in which it needs to remain competitive (Amabile et al. 1996, Levitt 2002).

The componential model is premised on the idea that intrinsic motivation is the most important facili­tator of creativity, especially at the early stages of discovering or defining a problem for which creative ideas or solutions need to be produced and of actu­ally coming up with creative ideas or solutions (Amabile 1983, 1988). The componential model of organizational creativity proposes that individual creativity increases due to concurrent increases in intrinsic motivation, domain-relevant skills and knowledge, and creativity relevant skills and pro­cesses (Amabile 1988, 1996). The work environment serves to enhance employee creativity through incre­mental increases in these three major components. Intrinsic motivation arises from a “positive reaction to qualities of the task itself” (Amabile 1996). Thus, an intrinsically-motivated employee would be inter­ested in and enjoy his/her work due to the qualities inherent in the work he/she performs. Domain-rele­vant skills refer to one’s expertise and knowledge in a specific field. At work, one’s domain-relevant knowledge may be reflected though such variables as self-efficacy for one’s job tasks and the clear understanding of one’s goals and processes at work. Domain-relevant skills at work would be influenced by the availability of training, resources, and infor­mation (Amabile 1988, Sawyer 1992). Creativity­relevant skills and processes refer to one’s abilities (both innate and developed) to generate creative ideas and to recognize, explore, and solve problems creatively. Examples of creativity relevant processes include involvement in prior creative experiences (including creativity training), personality character­istics related to creativity (e.g., openness to experi­ence; Costa & McCrae 1992), and a cognitive style involving creative thought processes.

To date most research addressing the componen- tial model has focused on intrinsic motivation as a precursor to employee creativity. This research has approached creativity from the perspective of cogni­tive evaluation theory, which suggests that environ­ments contain both informational and controlling aspects (Deco & Ryan 1985). Informational charac­teristics promote and controlling aspects inhibit motivation, and subsequently creativity. Researchers exploring the tenets of the componential model have examined several contextual aspects of the work environment that have been proposed to influence employee motivation and creativity. These context­ual influences include organizational and supervisory encouragement, work group support of creativity, job autonomy, sufficiency of resources, and work­load demands (Amabile et al. 1996).

Woodman et al. (1993) interactionist perspective of creativity is grounded in the theory of interaction- ist psychology (Schneider 1983, Terborg 1981), and premised on the idea that creativity is an individual­level phenomenon that can be affected by both dis­positional and situational variables. The perspective further posits that it is the interaction of an individ­ual’s disposition or personality and contextual fac­tors that fully predict that individual’s creative performance. According to Woodman et al. (1993), creativity in organizations is a function of a host of individual, group, and organizational characteristics that interact to enhance or constrain individual creativity. The individual characteristics include cog­nitive abilities or styles, personality, intrinsic motiv­ation, and knowledge. The group characteristics include norms, cohesiveness, size, diversity, roles, tasks, and problem solving approaches. The organ­izational characteristics include culture, resources, rewards, strategies, structures, and technologies. The interactionist model proposes that creative persons, groups, and organizations are inputs that are trans­formed in the process of creativity or in a creative situation, and in turn facilitate or constrain individual creativity.

2.2 Creativity in the 21st century

Because of the rapidly changing economy and continuing globalization of business, employee creativity— referring to the development of novel and useful ideas about products, practices, services or procedures—has become increasingly crucial for the survival and competitiveness of organizations today (Shalley et al. 2009). Successful firms both large and small require a constant stream of new ways of working; this ranges from the shop floor to the boardroom, from products, to processes, to services to concepts. The Boston Consulting Group has been running an annual strategy survey for the last eight years in which creativity and innovation have been the top ranked strategic imperatives for seven out of eight years.

Many academic researchers have begun to con­verge on the opinion that: “Employee creativity can make a substantial contribution to an organization’s growth and competitiveness” (Baer & Oldham 2006). It is hardly surprising that innovation and cre­ativity enable the development of new ways of work­ing that ensure profitability.

Frymire (2006) states in The Economist that “the biggest challenge facing organizations is identifying and developing individuals with brainpower (both natural and trained) and especially the ability to think creatively”. These findings have led to companies adopting measures to improve creativity in organiza­tions as illustrated in the succeeding paragraphs.

At the heart of the most admired and successful companies’ (such as Google, Apple, and Red Bull widely known for their creative talent) success lies a willingness to develop and encourage creativity across all levels of the firm. The Ernst & Young (2010) Con­necting Innovation to Profit study concluded that “the ability to manage, organise, cultivate and nurture cre­ative thinking is directly linked to growth and achieve­ment”. Considering this, we can understand that the opportunity lies in companies to take creativity seriously although not at the cost of strategy, leader­ship, communication and delivery.

2.3 Steps taken by management to simulate creativity

In some organizations, actions are taken to simulate creativity and innovation. The steps may have been taken, such as involving personnel in decision making, recruiting and appointing personnel with creative characteristics, setting standards for work performance and giving regular feedback, but cre­ativity and innovation are hampered in other ways (Martins & Terblanche 2003). Gaspersz (2005) sug­gests some more steps that can be taken by manage­ment - promoting open communication, including everybody in the innovation process to suggest new ideas, sharing knowledge, bringing people from dif­ferent disciplines together, creating a climate with tolerance for failure, setting challenging targets, cre­ating time for creativity, and allowing in-house entrepreneurship. Others have added giving rewards (Weiss 2001), setting clear visions and goals (Shal- ley 1995, Weiss 2001), providing information and helpful feedback (Zhou 2003), giving encourage­ment (Deci & Ryan 1987), stimulating a risk taking environment (Woodman et al. 1993, Mumford & Gustafson 1988), evaluating progress in terms of work and not in terms of outcomes (Mumford 2000, Shalley 1995), restricting constraints (Nohria & Gulati 1997, Drazin et al. 1999), structural measur­ing of creativity and making it part of process reviews, regular planning of brainstorming sessions, and making sure that team members have an equal status (Weiss 2001) in Klijn & Tomic (2010). Organ­izations also employ using creativity training for their employees. Over the course of the last half cen­tury, numerous training programs intended to develop creativity capacities have been proposed. These training sessions in formal techniques include brainstorming, lateral thinking and mind-mapping worthwhile. These programmes focused on develop­ment of cognitive skills and the heuristics involved in skill application, using realistic exercises appro­priate to the domain at hand (Scott et al. 2004). We will analyze the utility of these trainings programs further into our paper. Despite these measures to enhance creativity, organizations fall flat on their route to innovation. According to the 2007 McKin­sey Global Survey, 84% of executives believe innov­ation is extremely important for their company’s growth strategy. However, the successful implemen­tation of innovative products, services, and experi­ences is a road paved with strain and failure. While building the business, managers often let short-term growth override the long-term vision. Recently Fast Company published its 2009 list of the 50 Most Innovative Companies. An interesting finding was that 33 of the previous year’s 50 did not make to the list. Despite the amount of focus on innovation these days, when it comes right down to innovating, most organizations fail to consciously foster creativity, or at least are ineffective to real, ongoing innovation. In the following sections, we will attempt to explain why despite the measures, creativity is still a hard goal to achieve in organizations by first exploring the definition of creativity followed by examining the organizational environment in which most cre­ativity is to take place.

2.4 Interpreting the barriers to achievement of creativity

There are many barriers to creativity at work using these steps. Organisations do not understand how to identify, nurture, manage and develop creative think­ing skills, thus even though these steps are well-inten­tioned, they are poorly directed. Research conducted by McCombs accounting Professors Kachelmeier & Williamson (2008) shows that rather than encouraging more creative ideas, paying workers for better ideas actually stifles their creativity. It turns out that employ­ees paid to be creative may feel pressured, limiting their output creative and non-creative both.

The core belief of these research studies on enhancing creativity thus far is that management is in a position to affect creativity in the organizations. According to Gahan et al. (2007), despite the fact that companies view creativity to be of immense intrinsic value to their business, they make no attempt to define it in such a way that it means some­thing greater than merely being efficient or compe­tent in the job. In this sense, creativity is actually a new euphemism for old ideas about the basic skills needed in any ordinary workplace. Following this interpretation, the word ‘creativity’ provides organ­isational theorists with a tantalising metaphor to con­jure with. Ultimately, creativity comes to signify a set of exercises, maxims and handy tips to help even the most creatively challenged in the organization to come up with those breakthrough ideas (Gahan et al. 2007). Thus, creativity has become a symbol of change and progress and not a quality. Organizations have come to treat creativity as a commodity, where it is claimed there is not enough of it (Chaharbaghi & Cripps 2007). In this way, creativity has become the “new problem”. This presents a major part of our argument that the definition of creativity has been misconstrued in the organizational context. In the following section, we provide evidence as to how employees in actuality are creative.

3 THE IMPLICIT CREATIVITY OF EMPLOYEES

The 2009 NESTA Everyday Innovation survey pro­posed that creativity was an integral part of modern work for all of working professionals and not just ChiefExecutives or arch- strategists. The findings of the survey were that all employees can find original and useful ways of solving the problems they encounter in their normal course of work. The only caveat being that in some industries and sectors, it may not be so much that ‘we can’, but rather that ‘we must’ approach of the employees. The findings went on to suggest that there is no such an employee who does not (at least sometimes) face problems and opportunities at all. When they do, this is when they need to call upon their capacities to develop ideas.

3.1 Redefiningcreativity

3.1.1 New ways of thinking

Our first point in this paper is to show that employees are creative individuals. The people who come to be hired by companies possess certain creative character­istics for use in the position they have been recruited for. Gurteen (1998) in his research paper on Know­ledge, Creativity and Innovation states that individuals are naturally creative and the need to create is a funda­mental driving force in human beings. As per Sir Wil­liam Bragg, well-known British Physicist, “the important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them”. The same rule is applicable to all aspects of creativity. Creativity does not require lots of new information- what it requires is a need to think about information and knowledge that is already present in abundance in new ways (Gurteen 1998). DreamWorks, the world famous animation studio is a prime example of a company which believes that every employee is creative. They value creative input from every employee, even its accountants and lawyers and actively solicits ideas and receives hundreds of cre­ative thoughts from all workers, according to its Head of Human Resources and Satterthwaite. DreamWorks recognizes that creativity can come from anywhere because people are a product of their experiences and each experience is different as each one has a new way of thinking. According to Epstein (1996) “Behav­iour is generative; like the surface of a fast flowing river, it is inherently and continuously novel... behav­iour flows and it never stops changing. Novel behav­iour is generated continuously, but it is labelled creative only when it has some special value to the community... Generativity is the basic process that drives all the behaviour we come to label creative.” Generative research shows that everyone has creative abilities.

Japanese auto manufacturers realize that all employees are ultimately “knowledge workers (Drucker 1973)” a term coined by Peter Drucker to refer to employees whose work was associated with knowledge management. These companies realized that the role of the firm is to both encourage and sup­port problem-solving by all employees. They recog­nized that front line assembly workers on the factory floor - the antithesis of a conventional view of knowledge workers were in fact essential to per­formance improvement for the broader firm. In encouraging and supporting problem-solving by these employees, the Japanese auto makers were able to give their work new meaning and unleashed much more passion on the factory floor (Hagel et al. 2010). Thus by deduction, all employees are capable of creativity because the nature of jobs poses prob­lems at all levels and dealing with problems requires creativity.

3.1.2 Right brain and left brain theory

In 2009, Consultants at Bain & Company in their paper Innovation in Turbulent Times mention that in order to be innovative, managers had to make use of both right and left brain or form a partnership with the more left brained person and vice versa. The right and left brain dominance theory was created by Sperry (1981) when he discovered the right brain and left brain structures. Roger Sperry earned the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1981 for his work with epileptic patients whose corpora callosa - the bun­dles of nerves connecting their left and right hemi­spheres - had been severed. When the two hemispheres could no longer communicate with each other, their differences became more obvious. He postulated that the left side of the brain is considered to be adept at tasks that involve logic, language and analytical thinking whereas the right side of the brain is best at creative and imaginative tasks. According to the Left Brain — Right Brain Theory, there is a big difference between the kind of infor­mation we process with the different parts of our brain. Also the way we think and approach decisions is therefore quite different. As we are all born with both sides of the brain, one half of the brain is dedi­cated to creative and imaginative insights. And it is this that makes employees creative by nature. It is however important to note that the left-brain or right-brain capabilities do not always reside purely in the eponymous regions of the cerebral cortex. Almost nothing in people’s heads is processed solely by one hemisphere; both contribute to nearly every­thing. But they do so in different ways, and people’s cognitive preferences exhibit significant differences. But most people have strongly preferred approaches for drawing on their brains to solve problems, and few are extraordinarily skilled at drawing on all regions of the brain. There are training programmes which suggest they can increase creativity by tap­ping on exercising the abilities of the right brain structures (Gorovitz 1982a, b, Herrmann 1981), however these programmes are have been found to be falsely premised as the two brains work together and there is no way to apply theories to just one part of the brain (Hines 1987).

3.1.3 Errors in measuring employee creative self­efficacy

Ford (1996) noted that employees require efficacy to feel motivated to create. Creative employees put in effort that is commensurate to the results of their effort and the ultimate outcome. Because self-effi­cacy magnitude affects task-related attraction, initi­ation, and sustenance (Bandura 1997), efficacy levels are likely to influence the extent to which employees enjoy creativity-relevant activities, initi­ate creative action, and maintain actual creative levels in their work. In the following paragraphs, we will discuss how studies measuring creative self-effi­cacy have downplayed the role of creativity under­standing in organizations. This analysis of these research papers tells us that even studies of creativity tend to incorrectly frame and measure employee creativity.

Tierney & Farmer (2002) examined how self-effi­cacy predicts creativity. Understanding creativity as the creation of the useful and the novel in a domain, Tierney & Farmer (2002) proposed that creativity in a domain should be predicted both by self-efficacy for that domain and self-efficacy for creativity. The authors proposed that job tenure, education level, job self-efficacy, supervisor support, job complexity, and job tenure would all positively predict creative self­efficacy. Choi (2004) proposed that a number of psy­chological mediators of creativity, including creative self-efficacy, creative intention, and creative person­ality, and to test this surveyed 430 students at a busi­ness school. Choi’s confirmatory analysis showed that creative self-efficacy explained 34% of the vari­ance in creative performance, while creative inten­tion explained 24%, and creative personality did not explain any additional variation, once other variables such as cautious personality were added to a longitu­dinal structural model. Jaussi et al. (2007) conducted a treatment on 219 professional senior managers. Creative self-efficacy was measured using the Tier­ney & Farmer (2002) scale, and creativity was meas­ured through co-worker appraisal.

Unfortunately, these studies suffer from methodo­logical flaws which limit their generalizability. Con­sider how the studies treat creativity: Choi’s (2004) definition as “creativity as the generation of novel or original ideas that are useful or relevant” (p. 188), Tierney & Farmer’s (2002) definition as “the gener­ation of domain-specific... novel, and useful out­comes” (p. 138), and Jaussi et al. (2007) definition as “the production novel and useful ideas” are all close to each other, and to definitions of creativity used in other articles. However, all of these paper use reports by instructors (Choi 2004), a work super­visor (Tierney & Farmer 2002), or co-workers (Jaussi et al. 2007). Thus, creativity is operational­ized as the positive impression one makes on co­workers, rather than paying attention to a field, “all the individuals who act as gatekeepers to a domain,” that are the arbitrators of creativity (Abuhamdeh & Csikszentmihalyi 2002). Methodological flaws also weaken the research on creative self-efficacy. Cre­ative self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in his abil­ity to perform a task in order to achieve a goal (Bandura 1997, 2006). Efficacy varies in terms of the magnitude, generality, and strength of the expect­ation (Bandura 2006). Self-efficacy can come from an individual’s own accomplishments, observing a model, persuasion, or emotional arousal. Abuham- deh & Csikszentmihalyi (2002) present a guide for measuring creativity when they describe it as an individual who operates in a domain to gain recogni­tion by the field. Thus, in the future creativity can be measured by the recognition of the field.

These studies often view creativity from the per­spective of supervisors and relied a lot on report of others. And management has a bias to only view only top level executives as possessing creative talent. Some researchers believe people in firms can be grouped into two classes: those who have know­ledge and talent and, by implication, those who do not (Hagel et al. 2010). This segmentation is mis­leading and damaging to firms in the long run. This reporting of creativity levels by others presents a tainted image of creativity. When talking about talent, many executives focus on what Richard Flor­ida calls the “creative class”: engineers, scientists, architects, educators, researchers, coders, artists and, more broadly, knowledge workers (Florida 2002). But this focus on the creative class unintentionally diminishes the potential contributions from other parts of the workforce. Thus the creativity variables are many. Management often tend to focus on the top level executives when it comes to driving cre­ativity in their organizations. When executives focus on “knowledge workers”, they lose sight of the fact that even highly routinized jobs require improvisa­tion and the use of judgment in ambiguous situ­ations, especially if the goal is to drive performance to new levels. This way, the way we look at creativ­ity, we are miscalculating the creativity of employees and coming up with results that do not reflect the clear picture.

Employees are creative but they may avoid engaging in creative tasks as they might not believe their effort can result in any tangible outcomes because their status in the management hierarchy might not be of a “knowledge worker”. Creativity is often a time and effort intensive activity with a high potential for failure so it is paramount that employ­ees have sources of perseverance allowing them to sustain creative action in the face of such conditions (Amabile 1988, Bandura 1997).

According to Peter Mulford, Executive Vice President at BTS, a strategy alignment company, “the challenge is not lack of resources or creativity but of management capability “. This leads us to Levitt (2002) and West (2002) argument that the pro­duction of creative ideas is far more prevalent than their conversion into actual innovations, which proves to us that creative ideas abound in organiza­tions. However, the opposition that creative ideas likely encounter may have less to do with their worth than with the organizational and personal con­sequences they imply (Wolfe 1995). Thus, these ideas fizzle out due to the absence of work on them.

In his book ‘Where have all the intellectuals gone’, Furedi (1994) and Gahan et al. (2007) argues that the notion of creativity has become another feel­good term, indiscriminately applied, and intended to transform the mundane actuality of work into some­thing lofty and significant.

4 HOSTILE MECHANISMS IN ORGANIZATIONS FOR CREATIVITY

So far, we have dealt with issues in the definition of creativity in organizations and have argued in favour of individual creativity of employees. In the follow­ing paragraphs, we will examine whether organiza­tions support or does not support creative employees. Our concern is that much of the research about creativity in organizations has a relatively narrow training focus. Thus, we feel there is a need to broaden the outlook to understand the conditions that inhibit creative behaviour of individuals and groups in the work setting. In our propositions, organizations act as effective killing machine of new ideas and thoughts leading to situations where an individual employee gets blamed for the lack of cre­ative ideas. Some of the processes through which this is done are as follows.

4.1 Socialisation of new employees

When new employees are hired in a company, they undergo training to understand the ins and outs of the jobs to be performed. Training, job description and sharing policy expectations are all important parts of welcoming a new employee on board but there are other issues to tend to in order to make a new employee feel like a full, official member of the work team. New employees initially lack identifica­tion with their jobs and the activities going on around them, and are less likely to understand the contingencies in their environments for their careers (Kim et al. 2009). Through socialisation processes in organizations, individuals learn what behaviour is acceptable and how activities should function. Norms develop and are accepted and shared by indi­viduals. In accordance with shared norms, individ­uals make assumptions about whether creative and innovative behaviour forms part of the way in which the organization operates (Tesluk et al. 1997). The basic values, assumptions and beliefs become enacted in established forms of behaviours and activ­ities and are reflected as structures, policy, manage­ment practices and procedures. These impact directly on creativity in the workplace, for example, by providing resource support to pursue the develop­ment of new ideas or the lack of it (Tesluk et al. 1997). In this way individuals in organizations come to perceive what is considered valuable and how they should act in the workplace. Thus, they unlearn some of the methods of creativity that they had learnt before. The assumptions of personnel in the organization on how to act and behave within the sub-systems context, as explained above will have an impact on the degree of creativity and innovation in the organization (Martins 2000).

4.2 Abusive supervision and leadership

Team leader’s abusive supervision may undermine team member creativity because it reduces team member intrinsic motivation, which refers to the degree to which an individual undertakes an activity for the sake of his/her enjoyment of and interest in the activity itself, rather than as a result of external pressures and rewards (Deci 1972). As per the com- ponential model of organizational creativity, lower the intrinsic motivation, lesser the creative urge. Liu et al. (2012) found in their study that team leader abusive supervision was negatively related to team member creativity. Tepper et al. (2006) estimated that U.S. companies incur a tremendous annual cost of $23.8 billion as a result of abusive supervision’s negative influence on employees. They found that abuse in the form of public criticism, loud and angry tantrums, rudeness etc belittled and humiliated employees at work, undermines their intrinsic motiv­ation (Keashly & Harvey 2005) and made them unsatisfied with their jobs and intending to quit (Tepper 2000). Abusive supervision also leads subor­dinates to doubt whether organizations respect their contributions and whether their jobs are meaningful to their own and organizations’ development (Raff­erty & Restubog 2011). Accordingly, abusive super­vision should reduce employees’ enjoyment of their jobs, thereby causing diminished intrinsic motivation towards their jobs. In addition, abusive supervision is viewed as a significant source of psychological distress (Restubog et al. 2011). Abused employees often suffer from depression, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion, and they tend to alienate themselves from their jobs (Aryee et al. 2007, Hoobler & Brass 2006, Tepper et al. 2004). In such a distressed psy­chological state, abused employees may have little chance of developing interest in their work, so their intrinsic motivation should decline substantially (Deci & Ryan 2008). Team leader’s abusive supervi­sion can account for the negative influence of abu­sive leaders at each level on his or her team member creativity. This is because of Social Learning Theory (Bandura 1986) where managers learn this behaviour from their managers and it trickles downward. This trend of abusive supervision following the inter- actionist model affects individual creativity in the organization.

4.3 Utility of creativity training programmes

People who think and act beyond reason (a common creativity characteristic) often find themselves feared, resisted, and rejected: feared because such acts cannot be accounted for within accepted reason, thus they increase uncertainty; resisted because creative acts bring about change when it is some­times unwanted; and rejected because creativity can be seen as contradicting reason - directly challen­ging the status quo (Chaharbaghi & Cripps 2007). According to Alan Weiss, the President of the Summit Consulting Group in East Greenwich, “cre­ative people do scare the hell out of everyone else. A lot of companies say they want creativity, but what they really want is for employees to find a way to do the job cheaper than they haven’t thought of yet” (Filipczak 1997).

Thus, at the organisational level of application, being creative is actually personally dangerous should the idea fail. Yet all creative acts are funda­mentally risky. Given the risk factor involved in being creative within an organisational setting, indi­viduals have to make a choice about the level of risk they are prepared to undertake in the conditions that exist at the time (Chaharbaghi & Cripps 2007). Man­agement often has to resort to criticizing and dis­couraging the reactive behaviour which comes from individual’s personal risk evaluation as they are so eager to celebrate successful creativity. Acknowledg­ing reactive behaviour as a rational and sensible response to a particular condition would imply chan­ging the underpinning logic of organising for imaginative outcomes. Thus, in order to protect the underpinning logic of individualism, organizations target the blame on lack of individual creativity rather than group or organizational hostile view towards creative personnel (Chaharbaghi & Cripps 2007). Thus, it can be argued that rationally man­aged organisations have the potential to demonise the very people that have the potential to break free from the mould and think differently (Argyris 1985).

Ignoring the importance of community permits individual employees to be artificially portrayed as the cause of poor imagination within organisations (Dunn 1991), legitimising the preponderance of training programmes that miss the connections through which creativity emerges (Chaharbaghi & Cripps 2007).

Chaharbaghi & Cripps (2007) have argued that “those who attempt to create conditions to facilitate creativity in organisations are working from a false premise: that the individual is not as important as the collective in the process of creativity”. The source of creativity is therefore an individual’s capacity, which can be excited by the organization. However, revers­ing this process will not necessarily boost an individ­ual’s creativity because of the conditions in the organizations. In this context, creativity often reflects a process of breaking free from organisational or societal allegiances. Whilst training emphasises the idea of a closed approach, where outcomes are pre­cise in terms of how to do a specific task well or how to achieve clear cut solutions to well defined problems. Education, on the other hand, must be an open approach where the emphasis is on under­standing, questioning, and seeing things from a range of alternative perspectives by being critical (Chaharbaghi & Newman 1998). The paradox of creative training is that whereas training stresses homogeneity and a convergent way of seeing, inherent in education is the notion of heterogeneity, tolerance of difference and shifting understanding. From this perspective, when training obscures edu­cation, the potential for creativity can be “trained out” of individuals because the repetitious and con­vergent approach is adopted to creativity, promot­ing conformity, thereby contradicting the need for thinking differently and encouraging deviance.

4.4 Hierarchy in organizations

In order to be efficient, organizations need an effi­cient chain of command. Organizations require the supervision of trained managers running their depart­ments and reporting upward to more senior decision makers. However, hierarchies turn out to be remark­ably inefficient when organizations are trying to leverage creative ideas and increase their innovation (Burkus 2012).

The chain of command works well for issuing orders and making decisions. In the process creative ideas stand little chance of being utilized unless they are being shared from the top downward. Cre­ative ideas that come from the middle or lower levels of a hierarchy have to work their way up through a series of managers, each with the power to veto but each lacking the power to implement. Innovative ideas are often rejected by supervisors because the people who developed them understand the novelty and applicability of the ideas better than them. The possibility of rejection increases as and when an idea progresses through the different levels as the managers tend to get further away from the domain the idea is applicable to and under­standing the true value of the idea in that domain is incomprehensible for them. This led Vanderbilt Professor Dave Owens to conclude that the stand­ard organizational structure contains natural con­straints that kill innovative ideas.

4.5 Mismanagement of freedom

According to Amabile (2006), managers tend to change goals frequently or fail to define them clearly. Employees may have freedom around pro­cess, but when they do not know where they are headed, such freedom is pointless. In fact, some managers grant autonomy only in name. They believe they are ‘empowering’ the employees to explore the maze as they search for solutions but in fact, the process is proscribed which leads to employees divulging at their own risk. Organiza­tions often create fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones which create distrust and also cause burnout. Keeping resources tight pushes people to channel their creativity into finding additional resources, not in actually developing new products or services.

5 IMPLICATIONS

Our research brings significant implications for both theory and practice. We have shown that the defin­ition of organizational creativity itself is limited in scope which leads to wrong interpretation of actual problem. This phenomenon is widely found among current organizations and needs to be understood thoroughly by management theorists for correct understanding of the issue of innovation. We propose that current creativity researchers recognize how the incorrect framing of creativity can lead to wrongful interpretation of the creative capacity of employees.

Management often undermines the potential for performance improvement with labels that draw arti­ficial boundaries through the workforce. It is time for top executives to relook the purposes that cre­ativity enhancing steps serve for their organization and the employees and how it may actually be ham­pering innovation. Creativity training may actually be missing the connections through which creativity emerges. Methods and tips to improve creativity have more of a homogenizing effect than exploring the creativity that arises out of differences. There is little hope that individual’s creativity can be facili­tated by being taught. The potential for creativity can be “trained out” if management follow training methods which are repetitious and convergent. We suggest that it may be time for higher management executives to go back to school and educate them­selves in what actually constitutes creativity and create an environment which supports this new thinking.

The IBM Global CEO Survey 2010 that inter­viewed more than 1500 CEO’s from 60 countries and 33 industries concluded that creativity is the most important leadership trait for the future. They suggested that “more than rigor, management discip­line, integrity or even vision - successfully navigat­ing an increasingly complex world will require creativity.” In light of this, it is important to under­stand how abusive supervision may actually be hin­dering creativity. Abusive supervision by top management renders middle-level managers more likely to display abusive behaviours and harm employee creativity across levels. This result ought to serve as a warning to organizations that abusive supervision should be avoided. Management needs to be aware how they may inadvertently be support­ing a hierarchical structure which works to dissuade creative ideas. On the other hand, employees should be conscious of the organizational culture and what aspects of it they should or shouldn’t adopt as some cultures may adversely affect their creativity think­ing through socialisation.

Because the odds of implementing creative ideas can be rather small, organizations and managers need to be aware that some of their potentially most productive ideas may never be realized and that social-political dynamics, rather than issues related to the ideas themselves, may be responsible (Levitt 2002, Mintzherg 1983, Baer 2012). Given the poten­tial for more highly creative ideas to cause conflict and create disruptions, the findings suggest that the implementation of creative ideas is a fragile endeav­our that requires systematic attention to a number of conditions if it is to be successfully executed (Baer 2012). Managers cannot be expected to ignore business imperatives but in working toward these imperatives, they may be inadvertently designing organizations that systematically crush creativity. Providing autonomy around the creative process fosters creativity because giving employ­ees freedom in how they approach their work heightens their intrinsic motivation and sense of ownership (Amabile 1988).

The Ernst & Young Connecting Innovation to Profit report (2010) found that fast-moving, agile companies recognise the importance of creative thinking skills, concluding that “the ability to manage, organise, cultivate and nurture creative thinking is directly linked to growth and achieve­ment.” Given these findings, it is crucial that man­agers take steps to understand the problem concerning organizational creativity and take appro­priate steps to create an environment which supports creativity and innovation.

6 DIRECTIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH

In this paper, we explored many issues concerning creativity in organizations and discussed creativity studies of the past half-century. We believe that more research and analysis needs to be undertaken to understand this issue in entirety. An interesting avenue for further research would be to explore the effectiveness of creativity training programmes in light of our finding about how creativity training may actually have a homogenizing effect on employ­ees, thereby not serving the purpose of generating ‘novel’ ideas in the organization.

Another valuable extension of our research would be to explore the thinking of management in under­standing why they take steps that might actually be detrimental for their organizations. As we explored how sometimes, management focuses only on the top tier of employees to train them in creativity thinking and leadership, they may be ignoring the employees at the bottom of the pyramid who are closest to the work process. We understand the focus on climate and culture for creating innovative organ­izations but do these imperatives pre-empt the need for creativity training? Creativity training in the 21st century has come to refer to a set of exercises and maxims, although we understand that creativity is a matter of human behaviour and behaviour can be trained. In light of this, we implore researchers to re­interpret creativity training in organizations. Per­haps, creativity thinking can begin training top level executives about the right way of thinking about the human potential in general. Another avenue for further research can be to understand how hierarch­ical structures may benefit creative thinking. Since most organizations have hierarchies and hierarchies are useful for transfer of information at most times, how can management better use hierarchies for fos­tering innovation instead of impeding it.

7 CONCLUSION

Research on organizational creativity has been and will go on for as long as organizations exist. This is because no one set theory works for all types of organizations. Despite that, the main contribution of this paper has been the identification of the shortfall with the problem definition of creativity in organiza­tions which leads to incorrect steps to measure cre­ativity and cultivate it. We conclude that the change needs to take place in rational managers’ minds before collective organizational creativity can be derived. Management that needs to recognize that cre­ativity is inherent and a part of all employee’s job scope. If institutions and, indeed, nations are going to mobilize their entire workforce, then they need to abandon this artificial distinction between who’s cre­ative and who’s not and look to redefine even jobs that appear highly routine to embrace and extend their creative aspects (Hagel et al. 2010). Performance improvement by everyone counts, not just perform­ance improvement for “knowledge workers.” Execu­tives need to redefine all jobs, especially those performed at the front line or the most routine and often ignored jobs in ways that facilitate problem solving, experimentation, and tinkering. This will foster more widespread performance improvement. Everyone, even the most unskilled worker, should be viewed as a critical problem-solver and knowledge­worker contributing to performance improvement and innovation. Perhaps creativity is a process of unlearn­ing, rather than learning as Mobley of IBM had ori­ginally suggested. We believe it is difficult to learn to be creative, but easier to become creative people.

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