Optimising Creativity Management: Problems and Principles
Igor N. Dubina
School of Economics and Management,
Altai State University,
68 Sozialisticheski pr., Barnaul 656049, Russia
E-mail: din@asu.ru
Abstract: This paper explores the problem of optimal management of creativity to develop and mobilise employee creativity in more effective ways. Optimising creativity management presumes interventions for employee creativity development and the improvement of the work environment for creativity, which are most relevant to the specific organisation, its goals, objectives and resources. This paper identifies the main principles and problems of optimising creativity management, as well as cognitive blocks to such optimisation. This study also allocates specific functions of creativity management research and development management and innovation management to define where these functions overlap and can be coordinated. Optimising approaches to managing creativity indicate prospective directions both for theoretical investigations and practical techniques to manage employee creativity more systematically and methodically.
Keywords: creativity; innovation; management; optimisation; organisational climate; measurement; creativity training; effectiveness.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Dubina, I.N. (2006) ‘Optimising creativity management: problems and principles’, Int. J. Management and Decision Making, Vol. 7, No. 6, pp.677–691.
Biographical notes: Dr. Igor N. Dubina is an Associate Professor and an Associate Dean of the School of Economics and Management at Altai State University, Russia. His educational background is in the fields of computer sciences and economics. He received his PhD in Social Sciences from Omsk State University in 1999. He has published more than 30 papers on interdisciplinary approaches to creativity, creativity management, creative decision support systems, innovation management and mathematical modelling of creative work. Currently, for the period 2004–2005, he is a Visiting Research Scholar in the Department of Management Science at The George Washington University, USA.
1 Introduction
Ideas about the development of employee creativity to enable successful business practices are widely distributed today. In the current literature there are many discourses of business creativity as one of the key factors of competitiveness in this ‘creative age’ (Bentley, 2000). Florida (2004), a Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, states there is a rise of a whole new class of workers in the USA and theworld: the creative class, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology or new content. According to his research, the creative sector of the US economy employs more than 30% of the workforce (more than all of manufacturing) and accounts for nearly half of all wage and salary income (some $2 trillion). If technicians are included in his analysis, the creative class rises up to 47% in some countries (Florida, 2004). Managing this new class of workers demands specific methods and approaches. However, there remains little consensus on how to define, mobilise, facilitate and manage this important and unique resource (Banks et al., 2003).
Creativity management is a rather new theoretical and practical discipline that has emerged in the last 15–20 years as a result of increasing interest in creativity to manage a business. This creativity has emerged from various aspects of R&D, innovation management, creative psychology and organisational behaviour. The term ‘creativity management’ has been used very often, and significant practical experience has been accumulated in this field, but the theory and methodology of creativity management are still poorly developed. For example, a definite conception about the specific object, role, goals, functions and methods of creativity management is yet to be developed. This lack of theoretical development leads to many questions, such as Is creativity management a
part of innovation management or a specific field? How do creativity management and innovation management correlate to each other? Despite the broad discussion rehearsed in the contemporary literature, there are no distinct answers for these questions yet. As a result, the problem of specificity of managing creativity remains unsolved.
This paper discusses the problems of optimally investing in and managing creativity to develop and use employee creativity in more effective ways. To formulate the directions and approaches for effective creativity management, we allocate specific functions of creativity management, R&D management and innovation management to define where they overlap, intersect and can be coordinated.
Employee creativity is often misused or used inefficiently and insufficiently due to a lack of adequate management systems. As Tan (1998) declares, “Sometimes, organisations are not creative simply because employees do not know how to be creative, and/or managers do not know how to lead and motivate employees to contribute creatively towards the organisational goals and objectives”.
In this paper, we discuss the question of the appropriate amounts and effective directions of interventions for the improvement of employee creativity and the work environment for creativity. Optimal improvement of creative climate requires appropriate measurement instruments. We propose a model for quantitative assessment and analysis of the work environment based on a measurement scale of the Rasch model.
We formulate an approach to optimising creativity management as an element of the realisation of a ‘total system approach’ to management of creativity proclaimed by Tan (1998). The system approach should ensure that all organisational rules, routines and procedures, as well as organisation subsystems (organisational culture, workplace environment, management structure, reward system, etc.) mutually support one another to develop and use creativity resources most effectively.
At present, the problem of optimally facilitating creativity is not clearly formulated. Management experience demonstrates that creativity can be extremely useful for business, but can sometimes be detrimental as well. Managers often avoid implementing programmes to develop employee creativity and/or to improve the work environment for creativity because of, in their opinion, impossibility of predicting results. Recently, theoretical or even hypothetical models connecting results of working activities, employee creativity and the work environment for creativity do not exist. Here, we suggest a model of the relationship between work effectiveness, employee creativity and creative climate characteristics.
2 Distinguishing characteristics of creativity management
From the second half of the 20th century, alongside with the shift from ‘Fordist’ to ‘post-Fordist’ economies and the increasing role of creativity in business, ‘romantic’ approaches to creativity as the manifestation of individual genius have been replaced with more pragmatic approaches to ‘everyday’ creativity (Boden, 1994; De Bono, 1992). These approaches are based on the understanding of creativity as a non-standard problem solving process or generating and developing new opportunities for business. For example, creativity, considered in an organisational context, is often understood as the generation of ideas, which are simultaneously new and appropriate (potentially useful) for an organisation (Boden, 1994; Csikzentmihalyi, 1988, 1999; El-Murad and West, 2004; Ford and Gioia, 1996). According to this point of view, creativity can be defined in the system of the following elements:
• a creative employee generating ideas and introducing variations
• a domain (a set of available ideas, rules, organisational routines and patterns of behaviour) and
• experts evaluating suggested ideas and selecting the variations.
If an idea suggested by the employee is deemed by the experts as new and useful, it is then included in the set of rules and the domain is subsequently changed. In other words, creativity may be defined as engendering original and useful ideas (solutions, methods and techniques), which are accepted in the organisation as the rules of future activities.
According to this model, experts’ evaluation of employee creativity is a first and basic element of managing creativity, but it is not enough for effective management of creativity. Advanced components of creativity management are the construction of an optimal work environment for employee creativity, and the adjustment and optimisation of creativity development programmes.
For further discussion of approaches to managing creativity, we need to specify the place of creativity management in the general management system. The diversity of approaches to managing ideas, inventions, technologies and innovations often results in confusing different phenomena, as well as confusing different approaches to managing them. In particular, 100s of papers have been devoted to the comparative analysis of creativity and innovations. The most common approach follows this logic: creativity is a necessary (but not sufficient) factor of the innovation process and as an element of the ‘innovative cycle’ or the ‘innovative spiral’ (Carayannis and Gonzales, 2003; Garvey and Williamson, 2002; Kao, 1996; Martins and Terblanche, 2003; Steele, 1989; Strica, 1996;
Westwood and Low, 2003; and others). Such definitions focus on innovation as the implementation of a creative idea for a new product or service. According to this point of view, creativity and innovation are regarded as overlapping constructs between two stages of the innovation process: idea generation and implementation. Their overlapping field is invention, that is, shaping a creative idea into some applicable form.1 In general, this approach is based on the following model: creativity (generating a creative idea) – invention (implementation of this idea) – innovation (implementation of the invention in practice). In accordance with this model, creativity is considered as an initial part of the innovation process, and consequently, creativity management is understood as a component of innovation management. In addition, the contemporary understanding of innovation management focuses on technological innovation and actually includes the functions of R&D management (e.g. Betz, 2003; Ettlie, 2000). Consequently, creativity management defined as supporting and organising the process of generating new ideas for further transformation into a successfully commercial product, is actually understood as management of technological creativity.
However, innovation may be a practical application not only of a company’s intrinsic creative ideas and inventions, but also extrinsic ones, which may be imported and converted into a competitive product or service. As some research proposes (Bess, 1995; Herbig, 1995), an organisation’s climate and structure may sometimes be restrictive for creativity but supportive for innovation and vice versa. Thus, the idea that an organisation cannot innovate unless it has the capacity to generate creative ideas (e.g. Westwood and Low, 2003) is, at least, disputable. Many companies innovate without creativity and experience ‘effective stagnation’ (Horibe, 2003), but a successful innovation process does demand creativity to be included in all stages of the ‘creation – commercialisation’ process (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Creativity in the ‘creation – commercialisation’ spectrum
Therefore, business creativity is a much broader concept than merely generating new ideas for future inventions and innovations. Rather, creativity and innovation are more complementary than consecutive business phenomena. As a result, managing creativity requires a broader conceptualisation than merely managing the process of generating new ideas for further implementation into innovations.
The more appropriate definition of creativity management may be specified by allocating its main objectives and functions:
• generation and evaluation of new ideas
• development of techniques for creative thinking
• support, facilitation and development of employee creativity
• encouraging and fostering creativity
• organising, monitoring and directing creativity
• assessment of the effectiveness of different programmes for employee creativity development
• construction of an optimal environment for creativity
• elimination of blocks to creativity and
• creativity audit (creativity measurement and assessment of creative climate in a company).
The comparison with the main function of R&D management (organising basic and applied research, inventing and developing inventions into working prototypes, testing and modifying products) demonstrates overlaps in the field of organising the process of generating new ideas. Comparing the major functions of innovation management (facilitating a company’s innovative culture, assessing the prospective efficiency of new ideas and inventions, work planning, project scheduling, estimating and assigning resources) delineates the intersection in the field of organising a supporting climate for generating and developing new ideas, but in general, creativity management, R&D management and innovation management are complementary management approaches; they have their own status according to their own objects, objectives and functions. Understanding creativity management only as an initial component of R&D or innovation management narrows down the field of a manager’s view on creativity potentials and limits the possibilities of mobilising employee creativity in all business process.
3 Optimally integrating approaches to managing creativity
The research conducted by Banks et al. (2003) demonstrates significant variations in managers’ understanding of creativity management. Based on this research and other works, it is possible to allocate five different approaches to creativity management (or five groups of managers who cultivate such approaches).
The first group rejects and even suppresses creativity as a useless factor in business. Many managers often decry creativity as unpredictable and uncontrollable, like the weather. Therefore, they do not want to invest in creativity development programmes; they do not want their employees exhibiting creativity, because, in their opinion, employees must follow instructions to complete their work on time and within budget (Couger, 1995; Kao, 1996; Proctor, 1995).
Managers of the second group consider creativity as rather important, but not a crucial factor or a primary determinant of competitive advantages. They also understand creativity as something that cannot be managed; therefore, it demands no special attention or nurturing. The main principle of this approach is non-intervention.
The third group accents creativity facilitation by providing appropriate workplace conditions. The fourth group focuses on intensive fostering and developing creative skills. These two approaches are most popular among managers and are often associated with the whole system of creativity management.
The fifth group emphasises the need to direct and control employee creativity; this is not, certainly, an overall control and prescriptive procedure, but a form of ‘soft’ organising, focusing, and directing. These managers acknowledge the necessity of creativity harmless for business process, therefore it must be monitored and controlled, and sometimes even constrained to ensure realisation of the company’s objectives. This point of view is rarely recognised or acknowledged, because such words as controlling, organising and optimising in conjunction with creativity sounds like something of a paradox.
It is an obvious and almost trivial postulate that the efficient development of actual business systems is currently precluded without creativity and change. However, creativity is opposed to the cyclical repetitions and actions in a business system, because creativity presumes the violation of routine repetition and the introduction of new elements; creativity is disruptive in its very nature. In the case of repetitive activity, an employee operates within the rules established by the regulation system, and in the case of creative activity he or she transforms the existing standards, combines the assigned rules, and creates new ones, thus changing the status and level of the managed system. Uncontrolled creativity of employees may be detrimental for a company, if employee creativity is not adequately engaged in the organisational context. Therefore, the assessment of the level of probable change and, consequently, the evaluation of the level
of admissible creativity are required. This is the rationalisation behind setting up the questions of searching for the optimal range of employee creativity, as well as an optimal programme for creativity development and actualisation: what programmes for creativity development and creative climate improvement should be carried out, which resources should be invested in that programme, and what results will be obtained. Intuitive decisions and qualitative analysis are often not successful, especially for medium and large business structures requiring more reliable and effective tools for decision making in this field.
Managers often consider creativity as an instrument for problem solving. Hence, they often turn to employee creativity when confronted with a problem. De Bono (1993) characterises such an approach to creativity as ‘a huge waste of thinking capacity’, because ‘the most progress comes from thinking about things that are not problems’. Creativity focused on solving current problems can ensure survival for a company, while creativity focused on searching for new opportunities can ensure successful development. Managers should encourage their employees to think creatively not only to solve a problem, but also to seek out new opportunities for the workplace, the department or the company.
It is not uncommon, as Tan (1998) notes, to find managers working hard to ensure that their organisations have a nurturing environment to encourage creativity, but even if creativity management is carried out in a company, it is often implemented in a non-systematic way: managers may occasionally organise some training or workshops on creative decision making for the employees or supervisors, conduct creativity sessions to find a solution for some business problem, make some changes in the reward system to encourage creative suggestions, and so on. Therefore, managers very often pay attention to some single approach, for example, creativity training or creativity motivation system improvement, and fail to take into consideration other aspects and approaches of creativity management, such as creativity evaluation, creativity outcome control, assessing the work environment for creativity or searching for an optimal strategy for
creativity mobilisation.
4 Selecting an optimal programme for employees’ creativity training
As noted above, the most widespread understanding of creativity management is the support and development of creativity. According to the contemporary literature, training has been a preferred approach for enhancing the creativity of employees (Parnes, 1999; Roff, 1999; Scott et al., 2004), and companies have invested time and resources in different programmes for creativity training. For example, Scott et al. (2004) provide a reference to the research found that 25% of organisations employing more than 100 people offered some forms of creativity training before 1990. Recently, training programmes and creativity sessions have become an increasingly popular mechanism for creativity improvement because they produce tangible results (such as new project or product proposals, patents and other opportunities and improvements) in a relatively short period of time. For example, 84% of the 43 creativity sessions that took place in 2000/2001 at Unilever R&D Vlaardingen resulted in useful ideas; 35% of these ideas ended up as product proposals and 65% ended up as project proposals; 22% of the sessions led to an innovation and 40% of the sessions resulted in work-in-progress (Mostert and Bruins Slot, 2005). Conducting creativity training does not demand large financial resources, and illustrations of the high cost-effectiveness of creativity training are known. For example, a two year creativity course at General Electric resulted in a 60% increase in patentable concepts; participants in Pittsburgh Plate Glass creativity training showed a 300% increase in viable ideas compared with those who elected not to take the course; several thousand employees of Sylvania had a 40 hr training course in creative problem solving, and the company has received a $20 profit for each dollar spent for this training (Naiman, 2000).
Unfortunately, evidences of low effectiveness or negative results of creativity training are usually not published. Therefore, it is impossible to infer the real effectiveness of creativity training on the basis of the most successful examples. It might be naturally expected that more than 100 different programmes, techniques and methods for creativity training described in the literature have different effectiveness in different situations. A quantitative meta-analysis of the effectiveness of creativity training (Scott et al., 2004), based on 70 unique studies containing 4210 participants, is one of few attempts to assess the effectiveness of creativity training and it presents the most comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of different methods and techniques for creativity improvement. Correlation and regression analysis indicated that training techniques produced different effects for such manifestations of creative activity as divergent thinking (fluency, flexibility and originality), creative problem solving (production of original solutions for novel and ill-defined problems), creative performance (generation of creative products) and attitudes and behaviours (e.g. reactions to creative ideas). For example, in the case of problem solving, the use of convergent thinking (r = 0.44) and constraint identification (r = 0.39) were positively related to study effect size whereas the use of expressive activities (r = −0.42), imagery (r = −0. 37) and metaphors (r = −0.34) were negatively related. In the case of divergent thinking, the use of convergent thinking techniques (r = 0.21), divergent thinking techniques (r = 0.14) and constraint identification (r = 0.16) were positively related to study effect size while use of imagery (r = −0.30) and metaphors (r = −0.11) were negatively related. Overall analysis shows that a greater emphasis on exploratory techniques diminishes training effectiveness while a greater emphasis on more analytic techniques enhances it (Scott et al., 2004). The authors argue that more structured techniques, such as problem identification, idea generation, conceptual combination and constraint identification, provide heuristics for solving novel, ill-defined problems and produce a more powerful impact on training outcomes than more open exploratory techniques. This research also demonstrates the different effects of creativity training techniques depending on age, gender, education and profession of group of people involved, as well as training course design and delivery methods.
We paid so much attention to this study here because it demonstrates new possibilities for managers and facilitators of creativity training and provides a practical basis to make decisions concerning an optimal training strategy which are the most relevant to the specificity of a firm as well as to its set goals, objectives and resources.
5 Constructing and assessing an optimal organisational climate for creativity
Creative performance depends on both personal creative qualities and work environment factors (Bharadwaj and Menon, 2000). Improving the organisational climate for creativity and innovation promotes effective problem solving in a company, and increases a company’s productivity and competitiveness. Therefore, optimising the work environment for creativity to achieve maximum effectiveness with limited investment is one of the key elements of creativity management. The creative environment depends on many different factors such as management structure, leadership style, workplace conditions, available resources, etc. In the literature, there are many recommendations on improving the work environment for creativity and innovation, such as how to motivate employees to be more creative, how to eliminate different blocks to creativity, etc. (Amabile, 1996; Couger, 1995; De Bono, 1992; Ekvall, 1996; Gryskiewicz, 1999; Kao, 1996; Martins and Terblanche, 2003; Rickards and Jones, 1989).
Approaches to improving the creative climate have been rehearsed in recent literature widely, but optimising this climate also requires some assessment methods to evaluate improvement efforts. The conception of optimising creativity management supposes that interventions for improving the environment for creativity were directed to the most appropriate areas and in the most appropriate amounts. However, only a few approaches to the assessment of the work environment for creativity and innovation have been developed recently. According to the research of Mathisen and Einarsen (2004), only four specific instruments for assessing the organisational climate for creativity provide accessible reliability and validity: Assessing the Climate for Creativity (KEYS), Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ), Siegel Scale of Support for Innovation (SSSI), and Team Climate Inventory (TCI). The critical analysis made in that research revealed a number of ways for the improvement of these instruments, including the selection of evaluated factors, scale development and a more emphasis on impending factors.
Despite some imperfections, these instruments, undoubtedly, may be very helpful for managers and consultants in assessing the effect of creative climate improvement efforts and identifying relative strengths and weaknesses within and between work groups. However, more studies are required to investigate the relative influence of different environment factors on work performance. Therefore, the correlation of environment factors with indicators of work performance is one of prospective ways of future research. For this purpose, the development of usable and reliable quantitative methods and tools for auditing and diagnosing the work environment for creativity is necessary to make an organisation’s creative and innovative activities more effective.
Existing approaches to assessing creative climate do not directly include factors of organising and managing creativity. As an attempt to improve existing instruments we suggest an approach to quantitative assessment of the work environment for creativity. In our opinion, the work environment for creativity may be represented by Organisational Creative Capacity (OCC) for facilitating, fostering and organising employee creativity. The OCC model is based on the study on managers’ approaches to managing employee creativity (Banks et al., 2003). OCC may be measured with three parameters (or three groups of parameters) such as:
• supporting, facilitating and developing creativity
• encouraging and fostering creativity and
• directing, focusing and monitoring creativity.
Each of these parameters may be characterised with some indicators such as:
• a company’s sensitivity to new ideas, tolerance to uncertainty and mistakes, risk taking, workplace conditions, granting time and resources for creativity, cooperation stimulation, freedom and flexible conditions for work, information exchange, available resources, creativity trainings
• cultivating intrinsic motivation, financial and non-financial stimulation and
•creativity/innovation strategy development, employee participation in decision-making, creativity hazard control, coordination of employee interests
and the company goals, creative leadership.
These indicators may be assessed with a questionnaire including questions or statements concerning each of the indicators like in existing instruments such as KEYS, CCQ, SSSI, and TCI. To collect attitude data, a Likert scale is usually used. However, the traditional methods used for processing the results obtained with such a scale are not appropriate for undertaking correct quantitative analysis because questionnaire items used for the ‘measurement’ of the work environment parameters have different significance or ‘importance’. Therefore, points of scales with ‘never-often’ or ‘disagree-agree’ continuum actually have different subjective ‘weights’ and the thresholds between these points are often confused. It is easy to show that the intervals between a Likert scale item points are unequal. Moreover, the relative intervals between points in each item may significantly vary from item to item. Consequently, the traditional way of consolidating and arithmetically averaging respondents’ responses is mathematically meaningless and inappropriate for adequate quantitative analysis. For processing survey data, we propose to use the Rasch model that helps to transform raw data into an abstract, equal-interval scale (Bond and Fox, 2001; Wright and Masters, 1982). The core idea of this measurement model is as follows: probability of a positive response on a questionnaire item depends on a respondent’s ability (or attitude) and the item difficulty (or agreeability). On this basis, the Rasch model establishes the relative ‘difficulty’ of each item in a questionnaire. Therefore, it provides a complex scale where each item is accorded a difficulty or ‘importance’ estimate.
This model is based on converting raw data obtained from traditional dichotomous or polychotomous scales into a ‘logit’ scale:
where xi is a logit score of an item i, Pi is probability (or frequency) of a positive response on the item. This transformation provides an invariant interval scale (‘true score’ scale). This invariance is a major advantage of the Rasch logit scale over Likert-type scales. The item calibrations derived from the Rasch model analysis are ‘sample free’ because their values are independent of the distribution of personal scores (Green, 1996). The model also provides fit statistics (error values) for each item and respondent, giving specific information about measurement quality. The construction of such a mathematically meaningful system for measurement may provide more effective analysis of the organisational climate for creativity and innovation.
6 The basic problems of optimising creativity management
To improve employee creativity and get more new and valuable ideas as a result, managers conduct creativity interventions such as training programmes or changing an organisational climate. These interventions may increase employee performance owing to more effective mobilisation of their creativity. However, this approach requires additional resources, so the problem of the effectiveness of the investment in creativity arises. It is obvious that this investment should be less than performance augmentation to ensure the profitability of the implemented creativity programme. For example, if an employer’s profit (P) may be given as P=s(p−c−w), where, s is the volume of sales, p is the price for production unit, w is the employee’s wage per unit and c is the cost of production unit, the conditions of the profitability of creativity development may be expressed as follows: ([ p + Δp] −w−[c− Δc])Δs>z, where, z is the cost of creativity interventions, Δs = Δs(z) is the sale increase, Δp = Δp(z) is the price increase (e.g. due to quality improvement) and Δc = Δc(z) is the cost reduction due to the employee’s creative activities. Certainly, this crude model simplifies a real situation greatly, but, nevertheless, produces two basic questions about optimising creativity management:
• What is the range and effectiveness of different interventions and programmes that can develop creativity and improve creative climate (taking into account the
specificity of a company)?
• What is the range of the influence of employee creativity and creative climate on work performance?
It would be naive to expect universal and general answers to these questions. However, the recent amount and quality of research on assessing creativity and creative climate, as well as accumulated management experience in the fields of creativity training and improvement of work environment, assume that the first question may be solved in the near future.
The second question represents a more complex task. The construction of formal models connecting work performance with employee creativity and the organisational climate for creativity is complicated by the absence of corresponding empirical base presently. In the literature, there is only fragmented data and no special systematic comparative research concerning creativity influence on work performance. Development of mathematical models and numeric methods for solving this problem is also confounded by the formalisation of creative process and creative environment. Along with the lack of empirical data, there are not even hypothetical models that could be utilised to direct future research.
A theoretical model that includes dimensionless variables and parameters such as the work effectiveness (E), creativity (C), organisational capacity for creativity (O) and non-negative parameters a, b, k, which are specific for each organisation, can be presented as follows:
E = 1/(1+k exp(-(aC + bO)))
In this model, the work effectiveness (E) is defined as the degree of achievement of the set goals or the ratio of the expected output to the actual output (Sink and Tuttle, 1989). The variables C and O are presented in unidimensional units of the Rash measurement model discussed in the previous section of this paper. In our case, for example, O = 0.0 corresponds to a neutral climate for creativity (50% of positive versus 50% of negative ‘normalised’ factors, according to a used assessment survey), O = 2.94 corresponds to 95% of positive versus 5% of negative evaluated factors for creativity in an organisation, while O = −2.94 corresponds to 95% of negative versus 5% of positive factors. Similarly, C = 0.0 corresponds to some ‘medium’ level of creativity, C = 2.94 corresponds to
95% of maximum level of creativity according to an assessment instrument used for creativity measurement. The parameter k corresponds to an organisation’s dependence on creativity and innovations. The graphical forms of this model with a = b = k = 1 and different values of O are presented in Figure 2.
Figure 2 Model of an employee work effectiveness and creativity in different work environments
This model cannot be considered as a precise predictive model. Rather, it is a hypothetical and illustrative model generally reflecting existing empirical results of studying the influence of creativity and organisational factors on companies’ performance (Bharadwaj and Menon, 2000). This model might be useful for subsequent development of the theoretical and methodological base for creativity and innovation management. It can be applied to estimate the effectiveness of an employee’s and company’s performance and make decisions concerning creativity development and organisational climate improvement in companies and organisations. This model represents the main principle of optimising creativity management that could be formulated as follows: ‘even if it is not possible to predict exact results from interventions for the improvement of organisational environment, it is possible to select and implement the interventions which provide the best results for a given company in a present situation’.
7 Conclusions
Presently, in the sphere of both practical management and management scholarship, there is consensus about creativity as a valuable and inexhaustible business and economic resource. However, there is much less consensus regarding the methods to manage this resource. This paper argues for the necessity of optimising creativity management in a company/organisation in order to mobilise the resource of creativity more effectively. Optimising creativity management is considered as an evolutionary stage and component of the development of the ‘total system approach’ proclaimed by Tan (1998) to holistically manage creativity in a company. Optimising creativity management presumes effectively organising resources and interventions for the improvement of creativity and creative climate. In this paper, we identified the main principles and problems of optimising creativity management, as well as cognitive blocks to such optimisation. These blocks mostly arise from an inadequate understanding of business creativity and creativity management.
We allocated the distinguishing features and functions of creativity management, as well as its overlapping fields with R&D management and innovation management in organising the generation of new ideas and providing an appropriate climate for this process. However, as shown, these management approaches to creativity, R&D and innovation are not consecutive but complimentary processes that have their own status according to their unique objects, goals and functions.
Considering creativity as solely an initial technological element of the innovation process limits the effective mobilisation of this valuable resource. All business process of a company should involve creativity, but, at the same time, employee creativity needs to be properly organised. A too narrow understanding of creativity management as only creativity improvement and development predominates in management literature and constricts the potentialities of managing creativity. Effective creativity management should not only support, develop and encourage employee creativity, but also organise and direct it. We argued that creativity can be considered as a measurable resource that needs to be organised and monitored. It is necessary to facilitate and develop creativity, but employee creativity should also be optimised and focused on certain goals. In providing freedom for creativity, a manager ensures a balance between overlay control and organisational chaos.
We formulated the concept of optimising creativity management in terms of optimal strategy for both employee creativity development and the improvement of the work environment for creativity and innovation. The development of creativity may be optimised by selecting and conducting training programmes which are most relevant to a specific organisation and its available resources. For this purpose, managers should turn to the results of the research on the evaluation of different training programmes described in the literature and in this paper.
In the construction of an optimal environment for creativity, managers and creativity consultants ought to pay closer attention to the instruments for assessing creativity and creative climate to identify relative weaknesses where appropriate interventions must be implemented. Optimising creativity management requires the constant monitoring of organisational climate. However, the development methods described in the literature are appropriate mostly for qualitative analysis. We suggested a model for quantitative assessment of the work environment that may direct interventions to the most appropriate areas, and in the appropriate amounts, to improve the work environment for creativity.
The approach to optimising creativity management developed in this article indicates prospective directions both for theoretical investigations and practical techniques to manage employee creativity more systematically, methodically and relevantly to the specificity of an organisation, its goals and resources.
Acknowledgments
Research of this paper was supported in part by the Junior Faculty Development Program, which is funded by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) of the United States Department of State, under authority of the Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961 as amended and administered by American Councils for International Education: ACTR/ACCELS. The opinions expressed herein are the author’s own and do not necessarily express the views of either ECA or American Councils. The author wishes to thank Valentin Katz for his help in this paper. Thanks are also due to the anonymous International Journal of Management and Decision Making reviewers for their helpful comments and remarks.
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Note
1Invention may be considered not only in the technical sphere, but also in a broad sense, like ‘concepts’ in De Bono’s (1992, 1993) works.