How Leaders Can Manage It for Success

Creativity is a valuable asset for businesses, leading to innovation, new products, and increased profits. As a result, many organizations invest in developing their employees' creative abilities.

Types of Creativity in the Workplace

There are two main types of creativity in the workplace:

• Radical creativity:** This involves creating something completely new and different from anything the organization has done before.
• Incremental creativity:** This involves making small improvements to existing products or processes.

The creative process can be broken down into three steps:

1. Problem definition: Identifying the problem or opportunity that needs to be addressed.

2. Information search and encoding: Gathering and analyzing information relevant to the problem.

3. Idea generation: Coming up with possible solutions to the problem.

Research suggests that contextual factors, such as the work environment, can influence the creative process. There are two key factors:

• Autonomy: Employees who have more autonomy in their work are more likely to be creative.
• Leader creative expectation: When leaders expect their employees to be creative, it can boost creativity.

A 2022 study by Gerben Tolkamp and colleagues examined the factors that influence each step of the creative process. They found that:

• Leader creative expectation was only related to the idea generation step.
• Autonomy was only related to the problem definition step.
• The idea generation step was related to both radical and incremental creativity.
• The problem definition step was only related to radical creativity.

Implications for Leaders

The type of creativity that leaders should encourage depends on the organization's goals. If the goal is to create new products or services, leaders should focus on both leader creative expectation and autonomy. If the goal is to make small improvements to existing products or services, autonomy may be sufficient.

Conclusion

Creativity is a complex process that can be influenced by a variety of factors. Leaders can play an important role in fostering creativity by creating a supportive work environment and providing employees with the resources they need to be creative.

Reference:

Tolkamp, G., Vriend, T., Verwaeren, B., Reiter-Palmon, R., & Nijstad, B. (2022). Disentangling the creative process: An examination of differential antecedents and outcomes for specific process elements. Journal of Business and Psychology, 37(6), 1329-1346.