1. 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: Tuesday, April 09, 2019

2. 11 – Creativity (Runco Book)

3. Creativity (Runco Book)
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?

4. Creativity (Runco Book)
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

5. Creativity (Runco Book)
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?

6. Creativity (Runco Book)
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?

7. Creativity (Runco Book)
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)--

8. Creativity (Runco Book)
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

9. Creativity (Runco Book)
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?

10. Creativity (Runco Book)
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!)

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