The Role of Leadership in Enhancing Creativity (Part I)

This blog explores individual creativity and the role of leadership in fostering an organisational context that sustains employee and group organisational creativity and innovation.

In my January 2019 blog I explained that the growing shift to the knowledge economy has eclipsed the traditional engines of labor, material and capital for wealth creation by the power of the intellect. Nowadays, idea generation (creativity) and expertise (knowledge) are the primary sources of value creation and human imagination the primary source of wealth creation(1).

Whereas expertise is a rather straightforward concept to grasp, creativity and its antecedents are more of a vague idea. Whilst human imagination is at its source, not all novel ideas are considered creative. They need to be useful too. It is also important to note that creativity is not necessarily about producing a completely new idea or product, one that never existed before; rather, creativity often involves combining existing ideas in new ways that are useful for solving practical problems. Creativity requires the ability to think divergently, see things from different perspectives, and combine previously unrelated processes, products, or materials into something new and better(2).

WHAT ARE THE FACTORS THAT SIGNIFICANTLY INFLUENCE CREATIVITY RELATED BEHAVIOURS IN INDIVIDUALS?

The earliest accounts of creativity were based on divine intervention. The creative person was seen as an empty vessel that a divine being would fill with inspiration. The individual would then pour out the inspired ideas, forming an otherworldly product . Scientific research on creativity was initially shaped by cognitive psychology in the 20th century. Cognitive psychologists have approached mental abilities and imaginational skills as part of intelligence (4). Imaginational skills- or else, intuition or insight abilities, have been considered as the beginning of the creativity exploration. Within this research stream, intuition has been defined as non-conscious (occuring outside of conscious thought) information processing that is also associative (linking disparate elements of information) and holistic (recognising features or pattern without making connections through logical considerations)(5)

While the outcomes of intuiting, intuitive judgments, are clearly accessible to conscious thinking, how one arrives at them is not. Research has demonstrated that there is a creative process which includes a sequence of thoughts and actions that lead to a creative product. One of the models that have been developed describes this creative process as creative problem solving and involves four stages: Preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. Preparation consists of preliminary analysis of a problem, gathering information and materials, and initial conscious work on the task. Incubation is a period during which progress is made unconsciously and possible solutions emerge. Illumination occurs when a promising idea suddenly becomes consciously available and evokes a feeling of “eureka”. During the final stage called verification the creative idea is evaluated, developed and refined. If verification shows an idea to be unworkable, then there will be a return to incubation, or even to preparation (6).

A later approach,- the social-psychological approach- has focused on personality variables, motivational variables, and the sociocultural environment as sources of creativity. A set of personality traits has been identified, comprising independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk taking. Maslow (1968) perceived creativity as one benefit of a self-actualised state. According to him, boldness, courage, freedom, spontaneity and self-acceptance -among other traits- lead a person to realise their full potential. Focusing on motivation for creativity, researchers have theorised the relevance of intrinsic motivation and need for achievement (high standard of excellence) among others. Studies on the relevance of the social environment to creativity have linked cultural diversity, availability of role models and resources (e.g. financial support), task choice; external evaluation, non-traditional education (the traditional one presents knowledge as isolated items and tests typically emphasise factual recall and rote learning)with creativity (7)

The most recent approach, is the one called confluence approach, which assumes that multiple of the above components must converge for creativity to occur (8).

HOW EASY IS IT TO BE CREATIVE?

To paraphrase the question, how easily can we tap into our intuition, combine it purposefully with our expertise in order to create something that does not exist or link ideas in a novel way?

According to the psychodynamic approach, it is not very easy, as knowledge and intuition are sourced in two distinct information processing systems – conscious (rational, analytical) and non-conscious (experiential, holistic) – that exist within the human mind. The conscious system of processing enables individuals to learn information deliberately, to develop ideas, and to engage in analyses in an attentive manner. Rational decision-making models, which have garnered the lion’s share of research on managerial decision making, utilise this system of information processing. The non-conscious information processing system, by contrast, is believed to have evolved earlier in humans and involves judgments derived from automatic and relatively effortless processing of information. It is psychodynamic and emotionally driven(9). Research has shown that knowledge comes at the expense of flexibility and thinking about new problems. Experts can become entrenched in their thinking. Too much education can stifle new ideas(10). For example, there are numerous studies with insight problems that show conceptual fixedness; people learn to use an object for a particular purpose and then do not see how the object can be used in a different way to solve a new problem. The physicist David Bohm used the term the tacit infrastructure of ideas to name the developed habits of thinking in certain ways, doing the same things over and over or being locked into paradigms. He explained that it is difficult to break the chains of repetition because these known patterns become comfortable and stable to our daily existence. The price of our existence however, is stagnation and fragmentation.

Creativity arises from the tension between the two systems. However, an interaction between and alternation of both systems is needed for all stages of the creative process described above to take place.

Using the above analysis of individual creativity as a foundation, in my next month’s blog I will expand to look into how an organisational environment fosters employee and group creativity.

Specifically, I will explore the following question:

HOW CAN ORGANIZATIONAL LEADERSHIP SUPPORT THEIR EMPLOYEES’ INNATE ABILITY TO THINK CREATIVELY AND USE THEIR EXPERTISE IN ORDER TO GENERATE NEW OR IMPROVED PRODUCTS AND PROCESSES?

-STAY TUNED-

Selective Bibliography

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Nonaka, I., & Von Krogh, G. (2009). Perspective—Tacit knowledge and knowledge conversion: Controversy and advancement in organizational knowledge creation theory. Organization science, 20(3), 635-652.

(2) Amabile, T. M. (1996). Creativity and innovation in organizations.

Baughman, W. A., & Mumford, M. D. (1995). Process-analytic models of creative capacities: Operations influencing the combination-and-reorganization process. Creativity Research Journal, 8(1), 37-62.

Chua, R. Y. J., & Iyengar, S. S. (2008). Creativity as a matter of choice: Prior experience and task instruction as boundary conditions for the positive effect of choice on creativity. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 42(3), 164-180.

(3) Sternberg, R. J., & Lubart, T. I. (1999). The concept of creativity: Prospects and paradigms. Handbook of creativity, 1, 3-15.

Vaughan, F. E. (1979). Awakening intuition. Anchor.

(4) Brown, K. A. (1988). Inventors at work: Interviews with 16 notable American inventors. Microsoft Pr .

Guilford, J. P. (1977). Way beyond the IQ: Guide to improving intelligence and creativity. Creative Education Foundation.

(5) Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. American psychologist, 49(8), 709. .

Lieberman, M. D. (2000). Intuition: a social cognitive neuroscience approach. Psychological bulletin, 126(1), 109. .

Sternberg, R. J., & Davidson, J. E. (Eds.). (2005). Conceptions of giftedness. Cambridge University Press.

(6) Sadler-Smith, E. (2015). Wallas’ four-stage model of the creative process: More than meets the eye?. Creativity Research Journal, 27(4), p. 342-352.

Wallas, G. (1926). The art of thought.

(7) Amabile, T. M. (1983). The social psychology of creativity: A componential conceptualization. Journal of personality and social psychology, 45(2), 357. Barron, F., & Harrington, D. M. (1981). Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual review of psychology, 32(1), 439-476.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988). Motivation and creativity: Toward a synthesis of structural and energistic approaches to cognition. New Ideas in psychology, 6(2), 159-176.

(8) Gardner, H. (2011). Creating minds: An anatomy of creativity seen through the lives of Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham, and Ghandi. Basic Civitas Books.

Mumford, M. D., & Gustafson, S. B. (1988). Creativity syndrome: Integration, application, and innovation. Psychological bulletin, 103(1), 27.

(9) Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54(7), 462.

Hogarth, R. M. (2001). Educating intuition. University of Chicago Press.

(10)Schank, R. C. (1988). Creativity as a mechanical process. The nature of creativity, 220-238.