Assessing Job Candidates' Creativity: Propositions and Future Research Directions

Identifying and selecting creative employees is of key importance in today's high‐pace business environment. Yet, little is known about how assessors in organizational settings evaluate the creative potential of job candidates. In this paper we review the extant literature on individual and team creativity in order to identify criteria (cues) against which job candidates' creativity could be assessed. We argue that the creative potential of job candidates could be evaluated against four key dimensions (the creative individual, the creative product, the creative process and the creative environment) and call for empirical research to further explore and test our propositions in practice.     

A Theoretical Framework Linking Creativity,Empowerment, and Organizational Memory

Empowerment, creativity, and organizational memory are constructs that have been researched in MIS. While each construct has received individual attention, we have found relatively little research linking them. One of the major edicts of empowerment is delegation of decision making authority to lower-level employees. Increased authority allows employees more freedom to be creative. However, if creative thought is generated but not captured, innovative ideas may be lost. Organizational memory can capture creative ideas as they are generated so that empowered teams can draw upon positive creative experiences. We developed a theoretical model to illuminate the relationships between organizational memory, worker empowerment, and creativity. The model portrays the linkages between empowerment and creativity, creativity and organizational memory, and organizational memory and empowerment. The model was developed based on the literature in each respective area and an interview-based study concerning “empowered” systems development project teams and organizational memory. Analysis of the interview data revealed that empowered workers generate creative solutions to problems. However, creative solutions can only be used for future projects if they are somehow recorded into organizational memory. Organizations that empowered their workforce and embraced creativity reported increased customer satisfaction, waste reduction, and some quality gains. In contrast, those that did not empower reported little or no change. Organizations that recorded creative solutions to problems believe that retrieval of this information could be potentially useful for future projects. Potential challenges faced by organizations classified into each cell are also presented. This classification scheme should prove useful as a guide to organizations examining the potential benefits and pitfalls of worker empowerment and organizational memory.     

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.     

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.     

Creativity (Ideas) Management in Industrial R&D Organizations: A Crea‐Political Process Model and an Empirical Illustration of Corus RD&T

Creativity management is a crucial topic to consider in the debate about the innovative research department. Against the background of discussions about individual creativity and organizational commitment, this article argues that the creative process in organizations is a matter of political strategies. The ideator literally has to sell his/her idea. The article therefore comes up with a crea‐political process model in which there is ample room for the thought that ideas emerge and survive within a social‐political context. In addition, the crea‐political process model is used to analyse the way in which the Corus Group Research Development and Technology (RD&T) department has implemented an electronic idea‐management system. The system, called eureka!, has been designed as a straightforward platform to capture, review, evaluate and select creative ideas. The findings challenge the literature on idea management in organizations to consider the political activities of ideators in the whole process of creativity.     

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.     

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.     

Creativity‐Stimulating Leadership: A Critical Incident Study of Leaders' Influence on Creativity in Research Groups

This study examines how group leaders in academic and industrial research settings stimulate creativity in group members. The study uses a modified version of the critical incident technique to collect creative incidents as perceived and reported in interviews with research group members. These incidents were content analysed according to the reported creative situation and the creativity‐stimulating leadership behaviours. Reasons for the importance of the incidents are given (each incident is subdivided into categories and subcategories). The highest ranked categories deal with how leaders provide expertise in research meetings and in supervisory situations, in particular for the advancement of research. Four types of creativity‐stimulating leadership behaviours are also discussed. The study finds few differences between how leaders in universities and industries stimulate creativity.     

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.     

Work routinization and implications for ergonomic exposure assessment

Jobs in many modern settings, including manufacturing, service, agriculture and construction, are variable in their content and timing. This prompts the need for exposure assessment methods that do not assume regular work cycles. A scheme is presented for classifying levels of routinization to inform development of an appropriate exposure assessment strategy for a given occupational setting. Five levels of routinization have been defined based on the tasks of which the job is composed: 1) a single scheduled task with a regular work cycle; 2) multiple cyclical tasks; 3) a mix of cyclical and non-cyclical tasks; 4) one non-cyclical task; 5) multiple non-cyclical tasks. This classification, based primarily on job observation, is illustrated through data from a study of automobile manufacturing workers (n = 1200), from which self-assessed exposures to physical and psychosocial stressors were also obtained. In this cohort, decision latitude was greater with higher routinization level (p < 0.0001), and the least routinized jobs showed the lowest self-reported exposure to physical ergonomic stressors. The job analysis checklist developed for non-routinized jobs is presented, and limitations of the task analysis method utilized in the study are discussed. A work sampling approach to job analysis is recommended as the most efficient way to obtain a comparable unbiased exposure estimate across all routinization levels.     

The Antecedents of Creativity Revisited: A Process Perspective

This study invokes a process view on employee creativity to uncover how the different stages of the creative process are associated with different antecedents. Specifically, we explore the role of five previously identified antecedents of organizational creativity in the different phases of the creative process within organizations: (1) personality; (2) rewards; (3) the role of co‐workers; (4) leadership; and (5) organizational resources. In an analysis of 22 case studies we found that antecedents of creativity indeed have different roles in different stages of the creative process and that antecedents that are helpful in one stage of the creative process, can be detrimental for another stage. Such results highlight the importance of conceptualizing creativity as a process, rather than as an outcome variable.     

Developing radical innovation capabilities: Exploring the effects of training employees for creativity and innovation

The resilience of organizations is increasingly dependent on their ability to develop radical innovation capabilities. While the literature documents numerous cases of organizations that already have radical innovation capabilities, the question of organizational devices that can be used to stimulate the emergence of such capabilities remains poorly addressed. Specifically, training for innovation and creativity has been proposed as a means to foster innovation capabilities; however, there has been little empirical evidence concerning the long‐term impacts of such training. To fill this gap, this article aims to document and evaluate the efforts of the research institute of a major Canadian energy company to provide training for innovation and creativity to initiate a radical innovation capability. We rely on a longitudinal study over the span of 18 months, where we observed 128 h of training and conducted 70 semi‐structured interviews with a sample of 40 researchers. We found that training for creativity and innovation has the potential to develop individual creative skills for exploration, to catalyze and federate collective action through common methods and a shared sense of what innovation entails, and to help create a common language and vocabulary between the different groups or divisions of an organization to talk about exploration.     

Organizational creativity‐innovation process and breakthrough under time constraints: Mid‐point transformation

Time, as a constraining resource, is an important factor in organizational creativity processes. Yet we know little about its role in influencing the creative‐innovative process. This paper uses a case study to integrate three process‐oriented theories concerning the importance of process mid‐points and breakthrough as time resources dissipate. The context we examine is the design process of an exhibition of industrial innovations at the Science Museum in Jerusalem. We argue that actors select a course of action at approximately the temporal mid‐point of a process and that this course of action is itself creative and leads to a breakthrough transformation. Two types of mid‐point creative breakthrough transformation are classified as recombining and pruning. We suggest a theoretical integration and further directions for research.     

Creativity – A Volatile Key of Success? Creativity in New Drug Development

This paper presents a study of successful and creative projects in the pharmaceutical industry. Creativity is here defined as the ability to bring forth a new product within a specific domain of knowledge, namely in gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and oncological medicine. The paper, being based on interviews with 18 of the most leading pre‐clinical, clinical and pharmaceutical researchers at former AB Hässle and ICI Pharmaceutical Division, suggests that if creativity is to be managed as an organizational resource, there are at least nine facets that need to be considered. These nine facets range from the most practical aspects to issues of project culture and human faculties such as curiosity and joy. The paper concludes that there is such a thing as creativity management but also claims that creativity is complicated to manage as an organizational resource, since it is based on both tight control and clear objectives at the same time, as there must be space for experimentation, discussions and what could be called non‐linear thinking.     

On‐the‐job Innovation: The Impact of Job Design and Human Resource Management through Production Ownership

A growing number of practitioners and academics endorse that the ability of organizations to foster, develop and use the innovative potential of their employees contributes to organizational success. Yet empirical investigation of individual innovation processes is lacking. In this research we address the question of whether both more flexibility in an employees’ job design and commitment‐oriented HRM activities promote individual innovative work behaviour. Findings suggest that a multifunctional job design and the perceived HRM system promote employee involvement in innovative activities through increased feelings of ownership for work‐related issues and problems.     

Entrepreneurial Orientation,Social Networks,and Creative Performance: Middle Managers as Corporate Entrepreneurs

Though previous research has highlighted how important it is for middle managers to contribute to corporate entrepreneurship, little work has been done to explore how they produce creative performance by examining the direct, curvilinear and moderating effects of their entrepreneurial orientation and social networks. A total of 337 middle managers conducting marketing, R&D and project management in Taiwan are studied. The results suggest that middle managers' disposition towards proactiveness and innovativeness is positively related to their creative performance, and their internal bonding networks and upper management networks are found to strengthen the effects of entrepreneurial orientation on creative performance. However, middle managers' external bridging networks are found to have an inverted U‐shaped curvilinear relationship with their creative performance, and to weaken the effect of entrepreneurial orientation on creative performance. These findings echo the interactionist perspective of creativity, implying that middle managers should manage their social networks more carefully, as social interaction with network actors may either facilitate or inhibit their creativity at work.     

Exploratory Study of Organizational Creativity in Creative Organizations

The creative industries represent an important and growing sector of the UK economy. This paper explores organizational creativity in firms within the creative industries. A questionnaire based on both Amabile's ‘Organizational Creativity’ model and Ekvall's ‘Creative Climate’ model was completed in ten firms in different sectors of the creative industries. Follow‐up interviews with five firms were also conducted, to compare the outputs from each model as well as the variation in responses from firms in different sectors. The results indicate that both models of organizational creativity are complementary, although not necessarily fully applicable in the creative industries. Specific differences between firms in the graphic design/branding sector and firms in product design were also observed.     

Optimality of Jackson's permutations with respect to limited machine availability

This article deals with the scheduling problem of minimizing the makespan in a two‐machine job‐shop with given w intervals of machine non‐availability. It is known that this problem is binary (unary) NP‐hard if there is at least one non‐availability interval (if the number of non‐availability intervals may be arbitrarily large), and all the jobs have the same machine route. We find sufficient conditions when Jackson's pair of permutations remains optimal for the two‐machine job‐shop problem with w1 non‐availability intervals. Extensive computational studies show the effectiveness (in the number of problems solved) and efficiency (in computational time) of these conditions for the randomly generated instances with up to 10,000 jobs and w5000 non‐availability intervals.     

We walk the line: Icons provisional appearances on virtual whiteboards trigger elaborative dialogue and creativity

Collaborative groupwork is a key creativity tool in industry. Digital Creativity Support Systems (CSS) have become a critical catalyst of distributed creative processes. Under laboratory conditions, this interaction design study uses an experiment to investigate the impact of apparent icon finishedness as a social affordance for elaborative dialogue, and enhanced creativity. The experiment examines the idea generation processes of 37 pairs of active managers using a synchronous CSS. Apparent finishedness is a purely presentational factor - it is completely separate from the actual substance of an idea. The results show that presenting ideas with icons made of sketchy natural lines with low perceived finishedness encourages elaborative dialogue and creativity. Low perceived finishedness icons functioned as a social affordance - they afforded the social behaviour of building upon each other’s ideas as well as more creative idea generation. This is the first study to quantitatively examine the perceived finishedness of icons. This study shows that minor changes in visual treatments significantly impact creative processes and outcomes. As co-constructive interaction is central to many collaborative behaviours across working and learning, this study has clear implications for the subtle encouragement of co-construction in computer-mediated communication.     

Subject Positions and Power Relations in Creative Organizations: Taking a Discursive View on Organizational Creativity

In this paper we take a discursive view on organizational creativity and examine subject positions and power relations produced within a discourse on creativity in two different kinds of creative organizations, an opera house and a games company. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the discourse is practised in creative production processes. The two cases illustrate how the macro‐level discourse on creativity can be enacted in a more micro‐level construction of subjectivities. In the study we identified several subject positions that were shared by both organizations, and examined how they were embedded in the organizations' formal and informal hierarchies. By taking a discursive approach to creativity, we have also been able to explore some unwanted consequences of emphasizing creativity in organizations.