The Role of Leadership in Enhancing Creativity (Part II)
This blog explores the role of leadership in enhancing individual employees’ contribution to organisational creativity by unleashing their creativity, properly managing the stages of the creative process and fostering a supportive organisational context
In my April 2019 blog I looked into the sources of and the factors that influence individual creativity.
In this month’s blog I will explore how leadership can support the creative potential of individual employees -sourced in and influenced by personality variables, motivational variables and the sociocultural environment- in order to facilitate organisational creativity.
IS ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY THE SAME AS INDIVIDUAL CREATIVITY? WHAT DOES IT ENTAIL?
Organizational creativity encompasses the acquisition and creation of knowledge, followed by the dissemination of the new knowledge to appropriate parts of the firm, its interpretation and integration with existing knowledge, and, ultimately, its use to achieve superior performance (1).
It is obviously a complex concept. Organisational creativity relies on the creative performance of individual employees, on the quality of interaction with their colleagues and their leader; as well as on the organisational context where the exchange is taking place. For instance, individual members of a team may have generated an idea but each idea is evaluated, enriched or rejected at a team level by their colleagues and/or their leader (2).
The quality of the creative interaction is determined to a great extent by four mediators (3):
Information exchange: It refers to the exchange of knowledge and ideas, through which, employees connect previously unconnected knowledge and ideas or recombine previously connected ideas, and thus create new knowledge (4).
Team-learning behaviour. It refers to an ongoing process of reflection and action, characterised by asking questions, seeking feedbacks, experimenting, reflecting on results, and discussing errors or unexpected outcomes of actions(5).
Dense communication networks foster coordinated action and facilitate both the information exchange and the team-learning behaviour as well as the transfer of tacit knowledge tied to intuition (6).
Cognitive diversity —perceived differences in thinking styles, knowledge, skills, values, and beliefs among individual team members - provides the different perspectives, ideas, and thinking styles required for creative processes (7).
Accordingly, an organisational environment that fosters creativity should offer a knowledge infrastructure (not only a technical system but a web of connections among people, given space, time and tools), social structure( e.g. open, flexible), resources (including finances, time availability, and personnel resources) and managerial practices that support the fluid and changeable nature of organisational knowledge. In fact, research has shown that organic structures allow wider interaction, diversity and individual expression(8).
HOW CAN LEADERSHIP SUPPORT THEIR EMPLOYEES’ INNATE ABILITY TO THINK CREATIVELY AND USE THEIR EXPERTISE IN ORDER TO GENERATE NEW OR IMPROVED PRODUCTS AND PROCESSES?
Leadership is pivotal in facilitating individual employees’ and teams’ creativity-relevant processes and outcomes by promoting new ideas, properly managing the stages of the creative process (from idea generation to idea structuring and idea promotion) and shaping a supportive climate(9).
Leaders who are able to facilitate organisational creativity are experts in their field, possess creative skills to properly evaluate employees’ ideas and have emotional intelligence to handle the developmental needs and interactions of its members. The leader’s own expertise and creativity is crucial because in most organisations, it is the leader who provides direction in the idea preparation phase, sustain creative thinking and behaviour and is responsible for evaluating, filtering and sponsoring new ideas. Moreover, it is through their evaluations and suggestions to employees, that leaders may trigger additional levels of idea combination, generation and refinement. Leaders’ emotional intelligence plays a critical role in enabling the awakening of employee creativity and their ability to communicate with one another, be receptive to diverging opinions and to utilise emotion to improve team decision making(10). Leaders with high emotional intelligence also recognise the differences in people's preferred problem solving styles and then integrate and synchronise these styles according to the demands posed by each stage of the creative process(11).
Leaders who are able to shape a supportive climate provide motivation, foster employees’ intrinsic motivation and create a culture where employees feel psychologically safe and experience positive emotions. It has been suggested that creative leaders must use different influence tactics such as intellectual stimulation , role modelling, goal setting and play practices in order to motivate followers (12).
According to the social learning perspective role modelling processes is one of the most powerful means for transmitting values, attitudes, and behaviours (13).Active participation of employees and teams in the choice of shared creative goals(i.e.what a team intends to achieve) and in goal striving (i.e. the strategies by which a team achieves a goal) highly influence their perseverance and final achievement of the team goals. Early experimental studies found that people who were assigned either do-your-best or difficult creativity goals exhibited higher creativity than people who were not assigned a creativity goal. In a study of strategy team retreats, it was found that “serious play” with physical objects triggered mind shifts and creative insights and that a playful culture is conducive to creativity(14). However, a fine balance should be kept between a leader providing motivation but not hindering employees’ intrinsic motivation. As I wrote above, even though the leader should participate in all phases of the creative process and loosely monitor, they should act as facilitators and not directors of the creative process and product, allowing for their employees to work autonomously and use their competence and discernment to determine the creative process and outcomes.
A leader is able to cultivate psychological safety and stimulate employees’ positive emotions, such as happiness and enthusiasm, when they are trusted. A trust relationship with the leader creates a safe context in which teams with a learning goal can engage in risk-taking behaviours without feeling vulnerable (15). Similarly, positive affective states stand out as factors that have been consistently linked to high creativity (16). Often team members are negatively affected by a rejection of their idea. They may feel anxiety, limited cognitive flexibility and willingness to share ideas. However, when team members perceive their leader to encourage knowledge sharing (as opposed to hoarding), they feel more comfortable to experiment. Especially, in a culturally diverse environment, team members, with a high level of psychological safety, are more likely to utilise the different ideas and perspectives of the cognitively diverse team members. Two examples among many: Rigby, Gruver and Allen (2009) studied teamwork in the most innovative firms in the US and identified trust as one of the seven important characteristics that fosters successful partnership among diverse members of a team. George and Zhou (2007) found that employee creativity in an oil field services company was highest when positive mood and leader support (consisting of developmental feedback, interactional justice and trust) were all high (17).
Creativity and novelty is the name of the game and we better get used to it!
It is enough to observe nature to notice the truth of it: Every local system of process and pattern exists on the edge of chaos and thus always on the threshold of new creative life.
We are not there yet!
What other qualities, do you think leaders need to cultivate in order to get closer to nature’s dynamic interplay between the existence of the old and the creation of the new?
Selective Bibliography
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