A Multi-disciplinary Perspective on Decision-making and Creativity: Using the Diversity of Truth-seeking and Sense-making to Advantage in Organizational Contexts Wayne Smith, Ph.D. Department of Management CSU Northridge Updated: Friday, December 07, 2018

11 – Organizational Creativity

Multiple Intelligences Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (1983) Verbal symbolic Spatial Interpersonal Bodily-kinesthetic Mathematical Intrapersonal Musical Can you identify one or more of these in the job descriptions, performance evaluations, and promotion criteria within an organization?

Creativity Principles Is “creativity” the wrong word to use in an organizational context? Remember, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” (Drucker) If attitude -> perspective -> behavior -> performance… Then perhaps conscientiousness -> creativity -> impact -> value Again, can you identify a pattern and practice of creativity principles and culture that leads to success within an organization? Runco suggests just the language and cultural barriers alone are enough to stifle effective creativity He offers the terms “enhancement” or “fulfillment of potential” instead

Best Practices Ekvall and Ryhammar (1999) find that creative outcomes are most likely if the organization does the following (organizational-level measurement) Challenges individuals with tasks that are meaningful. Employees have opportunities and initiative. There must be support (encouragement and reward) for new ideas. Employees must be trusted and feel that trust (viscerally). There is a permissive environment with frequent discussion and debate, but no animosity. Risk-taking is supported; experiments are tolerated. Most important, risk is viewed as a part of the creative process. In other words, what is the true and palpable “creative climate” of an organization?

Attributes Ekvall and Ryhammar (1999) suggest the following attributes be measured at the organizational-level (a “creativity audit”) Support for ideas Challenge Time for ideas Freedom Trust and openness Dynamism/liveliness Risk-taking Playfulness and humor Debates Conflicts and impediments Could you write one or more survey questions that would elicit reliable and valid responses from an organization’s various constituencies?

Self-Reporting Surveys Jones Inventory of Barriers to Effective Problem-Solving (individual-level measurement) Need to identify “barriers” and “absence of barriers” Four Key Dimensions (for example, on a Survey) Strategy Questions E.g., “I like to keep strictly to time schedules.” v. “I am easygoing about time-keeping” Values Questions E.g., “Rigid moral standards are unreasonable” v. “Modern moral standards are too slack” Perceptual Questions E.g., “I never forget a face” v. “I have a poor memory for faces” Self-Image Questions E.g., “I try to avoid competition” v. “I like to win” See also (Torrance Tests)--http://www.ststesting.com/ngifted.html

Problem Solving Strategies for Creative Problem-solving (Logstin, 1993) Taking a fresh look at interactions Restating the Problem Visualizing fruitful analogies Searching for useful order of magnitude changes Staying alert to happy serendipity, and Breaking your problem apart and putting it back together

Creativity Associations The Correlates of Creativity Intelligence Imagination Originality Innovation Invention Discovery Serendipity Intentions Adaptability Flexibility Evolution (you knew this was coming) Does your organization craft/cultivate, promote/fund, and measure/manage one or more of these attributes?

Studying Creativity One last word (Wayne speaking here) I think you need multiple methods to evaluate creativity at either the individual-level or the organizational-level Survey History First-person observation Artifact analysis (e.g., documents and communications) Quantitative analysis (e.g., financial performance) Qualitative analysis (e.g., interviews) Perception by external constituencies (e.g., customers and suppliers) (and perhaps more…Management study is hard work!)

Sources Runco, M. (2007), Creativity, Elsevier.