Organizational Antecedents of Creative Self‐Efficacy

A number of studies have documented a relationship between creative self‐efficacy and creative performance. The main aim of the present study was to investigate organizational factors that may influence such creative self‐efficacy. The examined variables included employees' task type and task autonomy, the quality of relationship between supervisors and subordinates (leader–member exchange [LMX]), as well as perceived levels of collegial support for creativity. The sample included 240 employees in a manufacturing company. The hypotheses were tested using partial least squares analysis. Results showed significant and positive relationships between the study variables and creative self‐efficacy, supporting the hypotheses. Furthermore, the combinations of task autonomy and high‐quality LMX, as well as task autonomy and collegial support for creativity, were positively associated with creative self‐efficacy. The results of this study may give guidance to leaders and consultants who want to enhance the creativity levels of employees through organizational development efforts.     

Does a Creative Designer Necessarily Translate into the Creative Design of a Product? Exploring Factors Facilitating the Creativity of a New Product

Product creativity is a rarely studied topic in the area of new product development; nevertheless, its importance has been recognized by many researchers in a variety of fields. In this research, two studies were conducted: the first was quantitative and the second was qualitative. These studies examined the relationships among five variables: analogical thinking ability, creative self‐efficacy, length of experience, team climate for creativity and product creativity. The results of a multiple regression indicated that analogical thinking ability is an antecedent of design creativity, and that creative self‐efficacy is a mediator between them. The results also showed that length of experience and team climate for creativity have significant moderating effects. These findings indicate that both person‐based (i.e., ability, self‐efficacy and length of experience) and situation‐based (team climate) variables are key factors in developing the creative design of a new product.     

The Influence of Individual Factors,Supervision and Work Environment on Creative Self‐Efficacy

In highly competitive global markets, organizations have to distinguish themselves with creative and innovative solutions to satisfy discerning customers. Creativity, an important precursor for innovation, provides organizations with a competitive advantage in a reinforcing loop of improved customer service, increased staff morale, increased retention of quality staff and further improvements in service ( Glisson & Durick, 1988 ; Anderson & College, 1992 ). Creative output comes from the performance of individuals with particular cognitive and personality traits ( Masten & Caldwell‐Colbert, 1987 ; Kirton, 1989 ) who are supported within a facilitative work environment ( Scott & Bruce, 1994 ; Amabile et al., 1996 ; Rice, 2006 ). Confidence in one's own ability or one's self‐efficacy is an important cognitive and social trait determining and sustaining work performance. Appropriate behaviours and performance standards are defined within the work environment and the ability and support received in meeting performance expectations enhance the individual's self‐efficacy ( Gist & Mitchell, 1992 ; Bandura, 1997 ). Both creativity and self‐efficacy have been associated with particular individual traits and environmental conditions in the workplace. While much has been written on these two concepts separately, less has been done to explore them as a single construct. This paper addresses the gap in the literature by linking creativity at work and occupational self‐efficacy. It reviews the literature on antecedent concepts and current research into creative self‐efficacy. In doing this, it provides the basis for further empirical exploration of possible linkages between creative self‐efficacy and individual and work environment variables. The contribution this paper makes is in the identification of specific variables that are significantly related to creative self‐efficacy. A model is proposed showing significant linkages between the identified variables.     

Lifestyle Meets Market: Bohemian Entrepreneurs in Creative Industries

By linking lifestyle studies with creative industries research, this article opens a new perspective on creativity and innovation management. We argue that artists in the creative industries have to bridge the gap between artistic work and the economic need for self‐management, and that a bohemian lifestyle essentially supports them in doing so. The bohemian lifestyle, which is characterized by a devotion to art for art’s sake, is an essential source for work motivation of artists and an increasing number of other creative workers. The article draws upon an empirical study into artistic work and employment in German theatres. Enacting a bohemian lifestyle enables actors as ‘bohemian entrepreneurs’ to integrate intensive self‐management and self‐marketing as well as subordination of private life to work into their artistic work life. Analysing the link between lifestyle and creative work is crucial for understanding the way in which creative workers become artists and, at the same time, entrepreneurs of their creative talent.     

An Exploratory Study of Entrepreneurial Creativity: Its Antecedents and Mediators in the Context of UAE Firms

In this study, we attempt to advance our understanding of the role of entrepreneurial creativity in the context of firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Through field research accompanied by a review of the related literature, this study identifies crucial antecedents of entrepreneurial creativity. The proposed model combines variables belonging to different contextual factors such as external factors (resource access, resource possession, and alertness to opportunity) and individual factors (creative self‐efficacy, expertise and intrinsic motivation). The model is tested using data from a large‐scale survey of firms in the UAE. We find that expertise and creative self‐efficacy is significantly related to entrepreneurial creativity. The results also reveal that intrinsic motivation and alertness to opportunity are the key mediators between contextual factors and entrepreneurial creativity. The findings of this study present some interesting practical implications to entrepreneurs in order to improve their creative skills.     

Design Dialogue Groups as a Source of Innovation: Factors behind Group Creativity

Sif – a Swedish national trade union for white‐collar workers in Industry – has recognized the importance of enhancing its service innovation processes through careful listening to its members. This article will discuss the Design Dialogue Group (DDG) methodology that has been developed through collaborative research between Sif and the Fenix Research Program, in order to enhance group creativity and organizational learning. The emphasis of this paper is restricted to the issue of enhancing group creativity, and literature and empirical data will be used in order to discuss the factors enabling and restraining creativity. The major assumption behind this study is that many factors behind group creativity can be controlled. Thus, a careful design of the group creativity process would increase the likelihood for success since measures to enhance creative behaviours and to avoid pitfalls can be planned and/or taken by a group moderator. In short, the aims of this study are twofold: (1) to relate prior research contributions to DDG experiences in order to augment our understanding concerning factors enhancing and threatening creativity in DDG settings and (2) to systematize these findings into a set of proposed design principles related to domain‐relevant skills, creativity‐related processes, and task motivation. These propositions concern the recruitment of participants, group characteristics, and group processes.     

Decentring the Creative Self: How Others Make Creativity Possible in Creative Professional Fields

Since its inception, the psychology of creativity has been concerned primarily with the study of individual creators. In contrast, this research is dedicated to an exploration of (a) who has a significant impact on a creative professional's activity and (b) what the contribution is that others make to creative outcomes. The research included interviews with 60 professionals working in science and creative industries in France. The following categories of others emerged: family and friends, peers and students, clients and funders, critics and gatekeepers, and the general public – and they were related to themes depicting the interaction between these different others and the creator. Findings reveal both similarities and differences across the five domains in terms of the specific contribution of others to the creative process. Social interactions play a key formative, regulatory, motivational and informational role in relation to creative work. From ‘internalized’ to ‘distant’, other people are an integral part of the equation of creativity calling for a de‐centring of the creative self and its re‐centring in a social space of actions and interactions.     

Creativity in non‐routine jobs: The role of transformational leadership and organizational identification

An increasing number of individuals work in jobs with little standardization and repetition, that is, with high levels of job non‐routinization. At the same time, demands for creativity are high, which raises the question of how employees can use job non‐routinization to develop creativity. Acknowledging the importance of social processes for creativity, we propose that transformational leaders raise feelings of organizational identification in followers and that this form of identification then helps individuals to develop creativity in jobs with little routinization. This is because organizational members evaluate and promote those ideas as more creative, which are in line with a shared understanding of creativity within the organization. To investigate these relationships, we calculated a mediated moderation model with 173 leader–follower dyads from China. Results confirm our hypotheses that transformational leadership moderates the relationship between job non‐routinization on employee creativity through organizational identification. We conclude that raising feelings of social identity is a key task for leaders today, especially when working in uncertain and fast developing environments with little repetition and the constant need to develop creative ideas.     

Do Intelligent Leaders Make a Difference? The Effect of a Leader's Emotional Intelligence on Followers' Creativity

This research investigates the connection between emotional intelligence (EI) and creativity. This was studied by exploring: (i) an association between leaders' EI and their followers' creative output; (ii) an association between six sub‐dimensions of EI and creativity; and (iii) a mediating role of climate in the link between EI and creativity. Two questionnaires (one for leaders and one for employees) were used to collect data in a hospital. Sixty‐six usable leader‐employee dyads were collected. The findings confirmed a positive relationship between leaders' EI and employees' creativity. At an EI's sub‐dimensions level, the current research showed an association between creativity, on one hand, and self‐encouragement and understanding of own emotions, on the other. Finally, no mediating effect of climate was observed. The absence of a mediating effect is interesting, since it suggests a direct link between leaders' EI and employees' creativity, regardless of the climate. This is important, since it calls attention to the paramount role of leaders in shaping individual and organizational behaviours as far as creativity is concerned. The paper also discusses implications for management and practice.     

The Designer's Self-Identity — Myths of Creativity and the Management of Teams1

This paper describes recent research conducted at Sheffield Hallam University in which practising designers reported on their experiences of working in a cross functional team. The survey related these experiences to the designers' attitudes to their creativity. Two models for creativity are proposed—one based on the romantic stereotype of the creative genius, the other taking creativity to be an attribute possessed by all human beings in some measure, which can be enhanced by personal effort or by training. Identifying features of cross functional teams which are likely to demand certain personal qualities in designers, the paper notes that these are at odds with the qualities of a ‘romantic-type’ creative person. The link between these qualities, and notions of personality as a set of fixed attributes is pointed out. Several theories of personality which describe mechanisms for change in self identity are described. It is noted that the results of the survey suggest that in many cases designers have a pragmatic attitude to their creativity, despite the prevalence of the romantic stereotype for creativity in the literature of both management and education. Principles are suggested for design education, to enable designers to re-evaluate creativity reflexively as a component of their self identity to enhance their performance as teamworkers.     

Development and Validation of Team Creativity Measures: A Complex Systems Perspective

Without formalizing the team creativity (TC) concept with reliable and valid measurement, it is difficult to conduct rigorous research to help teams generate creative ideas and problem solving at a high level, of good quality and great value. The one‐sidedness and lack of depth of existing research on team creativity leads to the limited reliability and validity of team creativity measurements. In order to solve these problems, we introduce the complex system theory and develop the TC Scale with nine items for team creativity from three dimensions: team creative thinking, team creative action and team creative outcome. The data is collected from three distinct positions of respondents (managers, team leaders and senior staff) in 183 creative teams. The results of reliability measures, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis strongly support our scale. Further, we test the correlation between team trust and team creativity to establish its predictive validity and make a further verification on the scale structure through second‐order confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, we discuss the implications for research and practice.     

The role of creativity in the context of academic entrepreneurship

The aim of this paper is to provide an insight into the role of creativity in the context of academic entrepreneurship. To move beyond prior research, we aim to explain the relationship between academics' perceptions of university departments being entrepreneurially oriented and their engagement in entrepreneurial academic activity by including a third variable, a mediator, namely the individual's creative self‐efficacy. Based on structural equation modelling, the results of this study reveal that it is not enough just to be entrepreneurially oriented for one's university department to engage in entrepreneurial academic activity, but academics have to believe and be confident in their own ability to be creative. Indeed, this study indicates the importance of encouraging creativity and innovation for creative potential to be realized as creative output resulting in the academics' engagement in entrepreneurial activities. Based on our analysis of two samples of academics from two European countries, the research implications are discussed.     

Stimulating the Potential: Creative Performance and Communication in Innovation Teams

Creativity is essential to successful new product development efforts. Teams constitute the organizing principle in most modern innovation activities. Although creativity research has revealed many factors influencing individual creativity, little is known about how team‐level creativity is determined. Since the creative innovation task requires teams to combine and integrate input from multiple team members, the team's communication pattern is an important determinant of team creativity. Based on a sample of 44 NPD teams in eleven companies, this study examines the effects of team‐member communication on team creativity. It is found that both interaction frequency and subgroup‐formation of communication have a negative relationship to team creativity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and further research is indicated.     

Why is Your Team More Creative Than Mine? The Influence of Shared Mental Models on Intra‐group Conflict,Team Creativity and Effectiveness

In competitive and dynamic contexts team members need to be creative to ensure that teams achieve high levels of performance and feel satisfied with their work. At the same time, team members need to have a shared understanding regarding relevant aspects related to task accomplishment and team interaction. In this study we investigate the mediating mechanisms of intra‐group conflict and creativity in the relationship between shared mental models and team effectiveness (team performance and satisfaction). We tested our model in a sample of 161 teams (735 individuals) performing in a management simulation. We collected data at three time points. Our results suggest that high shared mental models are related to low levels of intra‐group conflict, foster creativity, and in turn improve team performance and satisfaction. These findings contribute to a scarce thematic – the relationship between shared mental models and creativity – emphasizing the importance of a shared understanding for creativity and team effectiveness.     

Achievement goals influence mastery experience via two paths in digital creativity games among elementary school students

Although cultivating creativity is greatly emphasized in elementary school education and that digital games can be a promising tool for improving creativity, little research has been conducted to identify and explore how player‐related factors might influence the learning outcomes of digital creativity games. This study identifies 3 individual traits pertaining to digital creativity game playing and examines how these determinants influence self‐efficacy and mastery experiences of creativity using structural equation modelling. The participants were 275 4th through 6th graders, and the employed method was inventory investigation. The findings reveal that the participants spend a large proportion of time playing digital games after school. Moreover, the results suggest that motivation for achieving both mastery goals and performance goals is crucial to enhancing self‐efficacy and achieving mastery experience in creativity. Additionally, such motivation might enhance mastery experience via two paths: the experience of flow states and the strengthening of self‐determination and self‐efficacy. The findings of this study shed light on the design of digital games for creativity training.     

Creative Knowledge Environments: An Interview Study with Group Members and Group Leaders of University and Industry R&D Groups in Biotechnology*

This study shows that effective knowledge management is essential in a creative knowledge environment of R&D groups in cutting‐edge fields such as biotechnology. To a great extent, knowledge management is revealed as a group leadership task. Moreover, group leaders emphasize group organization as a way to generate ideas, while group members are concerned with creative leadership. Group climates are unanimously perceived to be conducive to creative output. Theoretical starting points taken in creativity are seen as fostered by the environment rather than by individual characteristics. Data were collected by semi‐structured, oral interviews (N = 84) with group leaders and group members at universities and biotechnical companies in Sweden. Data were analysed by content and categorized accordingly. Future research on creative micro‐environments should focus on leadership issues and knowledge management.     

How is Creativity Best Managed? Some Empirical and Theoretical Guidelines

In an Internet‐based study with an ethnically‐diverse sample of 1,337 managers from 19 countries (mainly the US and Canada), eight managerial competencies that elicit creativity in subordinates were ranked according to how well they predicted desirable self‐reported outcomes. The most valuable of eight managerial competencies proved to be: Provides Adequate and Appropriate Resources. Females outscored males in all eight competency areas, a dramatic finding that is consistent with other research on executive skills. The eight competencies can be derived from Generativity Theory, a formal, empirically‐based theory of the creative process, and are also evident in many successful cases of creativity enhancement in business and industry. Scores on a test that measured the competencies were substantially higher for people who had had creativity management training and were positively correlated with the number of hours of training people reported. In general, the study revealed a fairly dramatic range of competence across the eight areas and suggests that most managers lack trainable skills that are essential for encouraging workplace creativity.     

Emotions as Constraining and Facilitating Factors for Creativity: Companionate Love and Anger

Generally the literature has favoured the notion that positive affect facilitates creative performance. However, a recent critical review has demonstrated that negative affect can enhance cognitive performance and improve motivation. Moreover, with a few exceptions, previous research comparing positive and negative affect as either a facilitator of or a constraint on creativity factors has rested primarily on the valence approach. Unfortunately, the results were mixed. This paper explores the effects of two common specific emotions elicited in work team processes, anger and companionate love, on individual creativity, with the cognitive‐activation and the functions‐of‐emotions perspectives. The results from our experiment demonstrate that positive emotions can constrain and negative emotions can foster creative performance. More specifically, we found that companionate love constrains creativity, whereas anger facilitates it. Furthermore, our qualitative analyses of interviews with employees justify the implications of the experimental results in an organizational context. Our findings suggest that nurturing a moderate degree of hostility towards opposing ideas from others in an idea‐generation process while concurrently encouraging thoughtfulness in an idea‐implementation process can facilitate managing organizational innovation processes.     

Triggering Creativity in Science and Engineering: Reflection as a Catalyst

In the recent literature, creativity has been clarified as a phenomenon that categorically differs from intelligence in that the ideas that result from it may not be deduced by applying current reasoning techniques on the state-of-the-art knowledge. Thus, creativity clearly transcends intelligence. Despite this new perspective, by its very nature, creativity defies a true and complete definition and the issue of how to arrive at a creative solution for a given problem, continues to remain an open question. This paper represents an effort to gain insights into the nature of creativity. It begins by observing (i) documented manifestations of creative discoveries and inventions by leading scientists and inventors, (ii) records of creative flashes in many day-to-day ordinary activities, and (iii) instances of creativity in Nature. It then critically analyzes these observations to uncover what mechanisms trigger the processes that eventually lead to creative solutions to problems. This paper submits three hypotheses for cases (i) through (iii) and claims that reflection constitutes the underlying mechanism in each of them, serving as a catalyst for creativity. The first hypothesis is that, in many of the highly creative scientific and engineering discoveries, reflection has played an explicit role in catalyzing the onset of creativity in the scientists and inventors, leading to spontaneous solutions. The second hypothesis is that creativity may be triggered by resorting to implicit reflection. The underlying mechanism consists of highly experienced professionals who report arriving at decisions and diagnoses, almost instantaneously, through intuitive flashes that later turn out to be precisely correct. The third postulate is that Nature is guided by reflection, while utilizing enormous resources and knowledge at her disposal, to play her meta-level role in introducing creative traits, selectively, in one or more individuals of a specific animal colony. The resulting collective behavior of the entire colony represents a spontaneous, creative behavior, very different from that of a pure, homogeneous colony. In essence, the contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, although the exact definition of creativity continues to elude us, the use of explicit and implicit reflection constitutes two approaches that are potentially useful in triggering creativity, at will, in ordinary scientific and engineering personnel to achieve quantum leaps in our knowledge and achievement. The role of reflection is that of a catalyst. Reflection also appears to underlie the inner workings of Nature. Second, from the perspective of engineering pedagogy, these approaches may constitute a tried and tested mechanism for inducing creativity in ordinary students through practice.