Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USACAIMCreativity and Innovation Management0963-1690Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.September 2004133143144EDITORIALEDITORIALCREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
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Editorial Special Issue – Creativity in the Workplace
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pon accessing this journal’s website, one is first of all confronted with the journal’s aims and scope: ‘Creativity and Innovation Management bridges the gap between the theory and practice of organizing imagination and innovation. The journal’s central consideration is how to challenge and facilitate creative potential, and how then to imbed this into result-oriented innovative business development. The creativity of individuals, coupled with structured and well-managed innovation projects, creates a sound base from which organizations may operate effectively within their inter-organizational and societal environment’. The current issue, in our opinion, provides an excellent example of creativity and innovation management issues focusing explicitly on the creativity of individuals as part of an organization. This issue contains a selection of papers based on a Summer University Workshop on Creativity in the Workplace organized by Todd Lubart, Professor of Psychology at the Laboratoire Cognition et Développement (CNRS UMR 8605) of the University of René Descartes-Paris 5. This event was held in Paris as a week-long seminar attended by university researchers, advanced students and practitioners involved in creativity and innovation studies. The programme was supported by the French Ministry of Education, the University of René Descartes-Paris 5 and the cognitive science network for the Parisian region (RISC). The five papers in this issue highlight certain topics that received particular attention during the workshop. Some contributions (Sternberg, Kaufmann, Georgsdottir and Getz) focus on theoretical issues, whereas other papers in this issue provide empirical reports (Bonnardel and Marmèche, Kwas¢ niewska and Ne˛cka). Robert Sternberg proposes that creative leadership (at the individual or organizational level) which seeks to move people to a new creative, innovative state, can be conceived via a propulsion model. Leadership can, for exam© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
ple, accept and enhance existing procedures and paradigms, synthesize these in new ways, or challenge that which exists to move a field in a new direction. Eight types of creative leadership are defined and issues concerning selecting and promoting certain kinds of leadership are raised, with respect to an organization’s evolving needs. Geir Kaufmann provides the second contribution. He proposes that creative work varies according to the degree of novelty and the extent to which the work is proactive or reactive with respect to an existing problem. This framework, it is argued, goes beyond existing proposals, such as Kirton’s adaptor-innovator distinction. Different forms of creativity are thus possible, and each form may require different management techniques. Asta Georgsdottir and Isaac Getz examine the concept of flexibility and its role in organizational creativity. Two forms of flexibility, spontaneous and adaptive, are identified and measures are described. The importance of flexible thinking in the workplace is then developed and ways to provide a favourable context for flexibility and ultimately creativity and innovation are proposed. Nathalie Bonnardel and Evelyne Marmèche report on empirical work concerning the creative process in an industrial design task. They contrast experienced and novice designers, seeking to examine their different modes of thinking, the ways they develop new ideas based on the external sources of inspiration in a specific design task and how to best enhance their creative process. This paper illustrates how controlled laboratory studies can bring insights about the most adaptive practices to foster creativity and innovation in specific tasks with specific kinds of people. Lastly, Joanna Kwas¢ niewska and Edward Ne˛cka report results from a study of Polish managers and non-manager employees about perception of the workplace environment. They find that different perceptions exist based on the professional category (manager,
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non-manager) and gender of respondents. This work indicates that an organization’s climate is not necessarily perceived in the same way by different actors in a given organization. The implications concern the need to manage creativity and innovation differently for sub-groups of employees who share the same objective (but not subjective) work environment. This issue is concluded by a book review authored by Jeff Butler, editor of another Blackwell journal, R&D Management. His discussion of Chesbrough’s Open Innovation – The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology emphasizes the potential significance of the open innovation concept, stressing that the book should not be treated as if it is simply another piece of wisdom literature, and encouraging readers to ‘think of the implications of the open innovation concept – to be more conscious of the ways in which R&D and innovation are evolving and to think more enthusiastically and creatively about the strategies available to them in diverse situations’. In this, the journal Creativity and Innovation Management would like to play a
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challenging role, not only through these pages but by ‘mobilization’ of our Creativity and Innovation Management Community. We are now communicating with all distinguished members of our editorial board to develop new plans for the journal, looking forward already to celebrating the 15th volume, and in anticipation of that, but also to honour the Journal’s founding editors Susan Moger and Tudor Rickards, in organizing a workshop hosted by Blackwells in Oxford next year. For more details about this event, please look at the announcement on page 201 and check out our website. Our next issue will include a selection of contributions to the 8th EACI conference on Cross Cultural Innovation, and will also provide details of the 9th EACI conference, which is scheduled for 4–7 September 2005, in ´L odz, Poland (check out http:// www.eaci.net), as well as a book review of Michael Kirton’s latest book, AdoptionInnovation in the Context of Diversity and Change. Todd Lubart and Petra de Weerd-Nederhof
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A Propulsion Model of Creative Leadership Robert J. Sternberg, James C. Kaufman and Jean E. Pretz
his article presents a propulsion model for understanding creative leadership. First, it introduces some general issues in the nature of creative leadership. Then it presents the propulsion model. Creative leadership can be of three general kinds – leadership that accepts existing ways of doing things, leadership that challenges existing ways of doing things and leadership that synthesizes different existing ways of doing things. Within these three general kinds of leadership are eight specific types. The present view is compared to some other views. Lastly, the article draws some conclusions and notes other ways of dividingup types of creative leadership. What, exactly, does it mean for leadership to be creative? A number of models of creative leadership have been proposed, under different names. These models include transformational (as opposed to transactional) leadership (Bass, 1998; Bass & Avolio, 1994; Bass, Avolio & Atwater, 1996), emotionally intelligent leadership (Goleman, 1998), visionary leadership (Sashkin, 1988), and charismatic leadership (Conger & Kanugo, 1998; Weber, 1968). Our goal in this article is to present a model of the different ways in which an individual or an organization can be creative. In essence, the article presents options for how to express individual or organization creativity. In our early work, we suggested that all exemplars of creative leadership had a certain core similarity. We proposed what we called an investment theory of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart 1995a, 1995b), which asserts that creative thinkers are like good investors: they buy low and sell high. Whereas investors do this in the world of finance, creative people do so in the world of ideas. Creative leaders generate ideas that are like undervalued stocks (stocks with a low price-to-earnings ratio). Both the stocks and the ideas are initially are often
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rejected by the public. When creative ideas are proposed, they often initially are viewed as bizarre, useless and even foolish, and are summarily rejected. The person proposing them is often regarded with suspicion, and perhaps even with disdain and derision. Creative ideas are both novel and valuable. But they are often rejected because the creative innovator stands up to vested interests and defies the crowd. The crowd does not maliciously or willfully reject creative notions. Rather, it does not realize, and often does not want to realize, that the proposed idea represents a valid and advanced way of thinking. Society generally perceives opposition to the status quo as annoying, offensive and reason enough to ignore innovative ideas. From the investment view, then, the creative leader buys low by presenting a unique idea and then attempting to convince other people of its value. After convincing others that the idea is valuable, which increases the perceived value of the investment, the creative leader sells high by leaving the idea to others and moving on to another idea. People typically want others to love their ideas, but immediate universal applause for an idea usually indicates that it is not particularly creative. This investment view seemed to capture many important aspects of creative leadership, but to miss others. In particular, not all creative leaders seem radically to defy the crowd. Indeed, most of them probably would not view themselves this way. They may not view themselves as buying low and selling high at all. A different conception is thus needed that better captures the full variety of ways in which to exert creative leadership. The conception below considers various strategies that leaders may use to be creative. Creativity leadership may be viewed roughly in two senses. One is in the sense of
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setting trends that others follow. Such creativity can be seen in any field at all, ranging from the humanities to the sciences to business. A second sense is creativity in leadership in organizational or business settings. Here, the goal is to innovate and thereby improve the prospects of an organization or business. We believe that the bases for both kinds of creative leadership are the same. However, where they differ is with regard to their outcomes. In the organizational setting, other skills are needed that may be more general. For example, leaders in business settings are often creative, but also high in emotional intelligence (Goleman, 2001a, 2001b), narcissism (Maccoby, 2001), and in their ability to deal with people who may wish to impede them (Ciampa & Watkins, 2001; Davenport & Beck, 2001). They must also navigate the particular point the business is at, which may be unfavourable in terms of their initial prospects for success (Fryer, 2001; Peterman, 2001). Sternberg and his colleagues (Sternberg, 1999; Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2001, 2002) have proposed that there are eight different ways in which to exert creative leadership. If one looks at leaders who are creative, they lead creatively in one of eight different ways. These types of leadership represent different ways of metaphorically propelling those they lead from wherever they are to wherever the leader wishes them to go. The types of leadership can be divided broadly into three general kinds. Some types of creative leadership accept current paradigms. In brief, replicators do what others have done in the past. Redefiners do what others have done, but find a new rationale for it. Forward incrementers move one step or a small number of steps beyond where other leaders have gone. Advance forward incrementers move a large number of steps beyond where others have gone, sometimes, at their own peril. Other types of creative leadership reject current paradigms. Redirectors steer an organization in a new direction. Reconstructive redirectors move in a new direction, but use the past rather than the present as a starting point. Re-initiators virtually start over from scratch. Lastly, one type of creative leadership synthesizes various current paradigms. Synthesizers take what they believe are the best ideas from different paradigms, and put them together. In discussing these types of creative leadership, it is important to consider the extent to which type of leadership is a style that pervades the contributions of particular individuals. On the one hand, people may have preferred styles (Sternberg, 1997b) that lead to
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one type of creative work or another. Legislative individuals, who like to generate their own ideas, may be more likely to break out of existing paradigms (Sternberg, 1997b). On the other hand, no one is locked into a particular type of creative leadership. Different types of leadership may work in different places at different times as organizational needs change. Effective leaders match themselves to the needs of their organization. They do not simply impose a style on an organization, whether it works or not. The kinds of leadership discussed below usually start with an individual. But they can become absorbed into the culture of an organization. The organization can be one that becomes staid or that repeatedly innovates and stays ahead of its competition. We will consider each in turn. In discussing leadership, we will be discussing both personal leadership and product-based leadership.
Types of Creative Leadership that Accept Current Paradigms and Attempt to Extend Them These types of creative leadership accept current assumptions and apply them in new ways. Thus, they do not defy the crowd, but rather, ‘move’ it to a new location. They are most likely to be found in organizations that have strong cultures that they do not wish to change, or that view themselves as succeeding the way they are and hence are reluctant to tamper with what they view as a winning strategy.
Replication This type of leadership is an attempt to show that a field or organization is in the right place at the right time. The leader therefore attempts to maintain it in that place. The propulsion keeps the organization where it is, rather than moving it. It is the limiting case of creative contribution. The view of the leader is that the organization is where it needs to be. The leader’s role is to keep it there. This type of creativity is represented by stationary motion, as of a wheel that is moving but staying in place. The replicative leader metaphorically pedals in place, as with a stationary bicycle. Replicative leaders tend to be chosen when an organization is succeeding and the goal of those seeking the new leader is to maintain the perceived status, and perhaps, pre-eminence, of the organization. The greatest threat to the organization is likely to be perceived to be loss
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of current status, not failure to gain new status. The organization is seen as one that does not need to change or appear to change (cf. Sternberg, 2002). Organizations with highly successful product or service lines may seek replicative leaders who will maintain the standing of these lines. Organizations that have had a highly successful and possibly charismatic leader for some time may be happy to seek a leader who can, to the extent possible, replicate the success of the previous leader. Replicative leadership is likely to be most successful during time periods of relative stability, both in terms of consumer demands and in terms of competitive threats. In times of flux, the kind of leader that worked before may not work again, and the organization may lose pre-eminence by selecting a leader like the last one. Replication may seem to be wholly uncreative, but this is not necessarily so. And example is in the field of stringed musical instruments. Modern luthiers take great pains to try faithfully to reproduce the instruments of the past, such as by Stradivarius and Gagliano. Those luthiers who best succeed in recapturing the form and tone of the old instruments often find their instruments commanding the highest prices. Instruments that depart too much from these older models are often in lesser demand. For example, modern instrument-makers have produced carbonfibre violins and cellos that have excellent tone and that are easily playable. But the instruments are not very popular because they depart so far from the conventional notion of what constitutes a fine musical instrument. It may sound like replicating Stradivarius is far from creative work. On the contrary, the problem is so difficult that not even one luthier has succeeded in imitating the Stradivarius tone, despite many innovations in craftsmanship the luthiers have tried in order to reach the near-perfection of that tone.
Redefinition This type of leadership is an attempt to show that a field or organization is in the right place, but not for the reason(s) that others, including previous leaders, think it is. The current status of the organization thus is seen from a different point of view. The propulsion leads to circular motion, such that the creative leadership directs back to where the organization is, but as viewed in a different way. Metaphorically, this type of leadership is like riding a bicycle in a circle, so that one returns to where one is but sees it from a different vantage point.
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Redefiners are chosen by organizations because they can maintain a status quo, but appear to justify that status quo in terms most palatable to followers. A notable example in recent times can be found in the presidential administration of George W. Bush. For better or worse, Bush chose to demonstrate leadership by invading Iraq. He defined the problem that instigated this invasion as one of an immediate threat of terrorism through Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction. The invasion succeeded and then things started to fall apart. Most notably, multiple efforts to locate the alleged weapons of mass destruction failed. Leaders within the US government then undertook a massive campaign of redefinition in order to justify the war, not in its original terms (because no weapons were found), but in new terms, for example, the evil nature of the Saddam regime. Has he succeeded? From his point of view, he has accomplished something few marketers can: metaphorically, he sold a product that has failed fully to deliver, and has convinced people to continue buying it anyway. Some of the attempts at redefinition failed. For example, an attempt to link Saddam’s regime to al-Qa’ida’s bombing of the World Trade Center in New York was made, but then failed, by Bush’s own admission. Another attempt to link the invasion to the purchase of nuclear materials from Niger also failed when the alleged purchase was revealed never to have taken place. There are many examples of leading products that have represented redefinitions in their marketplaces. That is, they lead the market by functionally redefining what is already there. One example is the four-wheel drive ‘off-road’ utility vehicle. Very few people who drive such vehicles actually go off road, ever. Rather, they buy the vehicles for their cachet, snow-handling ability, roominess, or any other reason but the purpose for which they were originally intended, namely, to go off-road. Were manufacturers creative in repositioning these vehicles? You bet! They used to sell only to those who wanted an exotic vehicle that would go through rugged terrain. Profits on them have increased many times by selling them to middle-class people who are looking for sturdy vehicles to carry large families, to get them through snow or simply to convey a certain kind of impression of their rugged nature. A second and just as profitable redefinition is the use of aspirin to prevent heart attacks. Aspirin probably now is more widely used for this purpose than for its original purpose of pain relief. It has become the leading product for the purpose, simply by redefining itself. Many drugs, of course, are redefined in similar ways, such as Ritalin, a stimulant that
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is used to calm down hyperactive children! Wellbutrin, originally marketed as an antianxiety pill, is now also used for weight-loss purposes. A third example is the current use of computers, which originally were used almost exclusively as number crunchers, as wordprocessors, chess experts, medical diagnosers and so forth. A final example is the use of academic tests to measure the quality of schools, not just of the individuals taking the tests. Historically, achievement tests were designed to measure student progress. They now are being used as much to measure school progress as they are being used to measure the progress of individual students.
Forward Incrementation This type of leadership is an attempt to lead a field or an organization forward in the direction it already is going. The propulsion leads to forward motion. Most leadership is probably forward incrementation. In such leadership, one takes on the helm with the idea of advancing the leadership programme of whomever one has succeeded. The promise is of progress through continuity. Creativity through forward incrementation is probably the kind that is most easily recognized and appreciated as creativity. Because it extends existing notions, it is seen as creative. Because it does not threaten the assumptions of such notions, it is not rejected as useless or even harmful. Most products on the market represent forward incrementations. New improved versions of detergents, new models of cars, new breakfast cereals – almost all are small incremental variants, and sometimes, improvements on what came before. For example, two new breakfast cereals introduced in 2003 were Cheerios with mixed berries and Cheerios with strawberries. They are fairly typical new forward-incremental products. They take an existing product, Cheerios, and add some ingredients to them, hoping to capitalize on the success of other cereals (such as Special K) that have introduced versions with berries. Another example is found in ketchup. Heinz ketchup, in order to better appeal to children, has introduced green and purple ketchup. There is absolutely no difference in the taste of ingredients of these ketchups except for food colouring – yet children enjoy eating the oddly coloured ketchups more than the ‘regular’ ketchup. Forward incrementations tend to be successful when times are changing in relatively predictable and incremental ways. The times thus match the leadership strategy, whether in
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terms of leadership of people or leadership of products. When times change unpredictably, leaders may find that their strategy no longer works. For example, many Internet start-ups in the late 1990s were simple forward incrementations of other such businesses. Small variants in products or even image seemed to be enough to generate investment capital, if not to start a successful business. But when the dot-com market crashed, many of the startups went with it. There was no longer any investment capital to be had for just another variant of what already existed, and there was insufficient customer base to support the businesses. A notable failure in a forward incrementation occurred when Coca Cola introduced a ‘new Coke’ that they alleged would provide improved taste vis-à-vis the old Coke. Consumers rejected the new product en masse. Recognizing the fiasco, Coke brought back the old recipe as ‘Classic Coke’ and saved the better part of their soft-drink market.
Advance Forward Incrementation This type of leadership is an attempt to move an organization forward in the direction it is already going, but by moving beyond where others are ready for it to go. The propulsion leads to forward motion that is accelerated beyond the expected rate of forward progression. Advance forward incrementations usually are not successful at the time they are attempted, because followers in fields and organizations are not ready to go where the leader wants to lead. Or significant portions of them may not wish to go to that point, in which case they form an organized and sometimes successful source of resistance. The most well-known examples of advance forward incrementations are probably with regard to leadership in the arts. An advance forward incrementation is a work whose potential typically is not realized at its premiere, yet is later recognized as a step along the historical path of a genre. Products that are advance forward incrementations generally do not succeed at the time they are first introduced. Some are introduced only in concept. For example, many of Leonardo da Vinci’s inventions, such as the flying machine, were so far ahead of their time that they could not be engineered at the time of their conception. But the same concept applies today. When fax machines were first introduced, they were slow to catch on. Today, they are a routine part of most offices and even many hotel rooms.
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Types of Creativity that Reject Current Paradigms and Attempt to Replace Them These types of creativity reject current ways of doing things and propose new assumptions or paradigms. They are transformational in character (Bass, 1998), and the leaders that implement them are likely to be charismatic (Strange & Mumford, 2002). Thus, they are the crowd-defying types of creativity (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995a). They are most likely to occur in organizations believing, for one reason or another, that they must change to survive. Examples are organizations in bankruptcy, organizations that have experienced a major scandal and organizations that pride themselves on staying one or more steps ahead of the competition.
Redirection This type of leadership is an attempt to redirect an organization field, or product line from where it is headed toward a different direction. The propulsion thus leads to motion in a direction that diverges from the way the organization is currently moving. Examples of products that represent redirections are binary computers in comparison with calculators, electric cars and electric razors. All do what was done before, but in a new way. The basic starting point is not different. For example, electric cars often cannot be distinguished from petrol-powered cars by appearance. Electric razors can be distinguished in appearance from manual razors, but the basic cutting mechanism, the blade, is the same. Nevertheless, the basic product is taken in a different direction to form a new product. Redirections can change a field in unpredictable ways. For example, computers were originally viewed as rapid serial-information processors. Artificial-intelligence research tried to create expert programs by creating ever-more rapid and powerful rapid serial processors. But then it was realized that computer learning might better occur through massive parallel distributed processing. Today many computer programs use such a model and are able to achieve higher levels of expertise than was possible through the serial information-processing model.
Reconstruction/Redirection This type of creative leadership is an attempt to move a field or an organization or a product line back to where it once was (a reconstruc-
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tion of the past) so that it may move onward from that point, but in a direction different from the one it took from that point onward. The propulsion thus leads to motion that is backward and then redirective from an earlier point in time. Examples of products and services that represent reconstruction/redirection are not hard to find. Indeed, one can find whole stores that sell modern versions of old nostalgia products, such as advertisements for long-gone products such as Bromo-Seltzer or Brill Cream. Watches with mechanical movements are made by many of the most prestigious manufacturers, such as Rolex, and also represent a modern twist on an old and, in many respects, dated idea (in that battery-powered watches save one the bother of having to reset the watch). American Airlines’ adding legroom in coach seating areas is actually another example of a return, and in this case, a welcome one. Reconstruction-redirection might seem inevitably to be a throwback, and perhaps a pathetic throwback, to the past. This is not necessarily the case, however. When Bill Clinton took over as president, he and his administration returned to a very old idea that had gone out of fashion in US federal budgets – the idea of producing a balanced budget and even a surplus. It had been a long time since any administration had tried its hand at this old idea. Reagan talked about it, but ran up record deficits, which have been exceeded only by the government of George W. Bush. Clinton actually returned to balanced budgeting, which lasted until the end of his administration and the beginning of the next one. Achieving a surplus may seem not very creative. On the contrary, no other US president has found a way to do it in many years, and the current government, elected on a platform of fiscal conservatism, has ballooned the deficit to levels that previously would have been unimaginable, even in a fiscally ‘liberal’ administration.
Re-initiation This type of leadership is an attempt to move a field, organization or product line to a different, as yet unreached, starting point and then to move from that point. The propulsion is thus from a new starting point in a direction that is different from that the field, organization or product line previously has pursued. A number of different types of products can be viewed as forms of re-initiations. Examples are electric and gas washers in comparison with hand washboards, the first airplanes in comparison with ground transportation, the first spaceships in comparison with airplanes
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and the first use of fire for cooking. What these re-initiations have in common is that they do not just build on mechanisms of their predecessors, but rather, use wholly different mechanisms. They conceive of a way of providing something people need through a means that is essentially totally different from what came before.
A Type of Creativity that Integrates Existing Paradigms to Create a New One Some organizations want to take the best of all worlds. They look at their competitors or the history of their own organization, and try to select the best elements. They seek synthesizers.
Synthesis In this type of creative leadership, the creator integrates two ideas that previously were seen as unrelated or even as opposed. What formerly were viewed as distinct ideas are now viewed as related, and capable of being unified. Integration is a key means by which progress is attained in the sciences. It represents neither an acceptance nor a rejection of existing paradigms, but rather, a merger of them. Examples of products that are syntheses are seaplanes, which combine features of planes and boats; office-suite software, which combines multiple largely independent products into one integrated package, e-books, which display what formerly were printed books through software, and handheld scheduling devices, which combine aspects of computers with aspects of traditional calendars. Mergers are typically attempts to build through synthesis. For example, when Hewlett-Packard bought Compaq, the goal was to merge the functions of the two companies. Hewlett-Packard had traditionally been strong in the printer business, but not in the business of producing computers. Compaq demonstrated the reverse pattern. The acquisition was designed to synthesize these two different strengths.
Comparison of the Propulsion View to Alternative Views Of course, there are many views of creativity applied to business settings and elsewhere. Drucker (1999) suggests that many creative innovations spring from one or more of four
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sources: unexpected occurrences, incongruities, process needs and industry and market changes. In our terms, whether a company becomes stuck in existing paradigms or goes on to create new ones depends on their utilizing these sources of opportunity as they arise. Managers of successful companies value innovation and not just the deductive logic that will lead them to repeat what has been done in the past (Kim & Mauborgne, 1999). Amabile (1999) views creativity as being at the intersection of expertise, creative-thinking skills and motivation. We would agree that all three of these components can be important to creativity. At the same time, we would point out that expertise may be more likely to encourage individuals to stick to so-called tried-and-true paradigms – to work within the boundaries set by whose work one has studied. Amabile especially emphasizes how managers can kill off creativity by emphasizing extrinsic rather than intrinsic motivators. Leonard and Rayport (1999) stress that, in marketing, managers need to be creative not just in recognizing manifest customer needs, but also latent needs that customers may have that they do not recognize they have. Such needs may be responsive to hot products, but it takes the marketer to realize what will become hot. For example, fish-oil supplements have become a very popular item, especially for middle-aged people. Five years ago, these people, for the most part, did not recognize their ‘need’ for such supplements. In terms of our propulsion theory, such marketers are redirectors or re-initiators of customer needs. They essentially create a need for a product that responds to a need that the customer does not yet know he or she has. They do not respond to existing paradigms, because they create the marketing paradigms rather than relying on already existing ones. Leonard and Straus (1999) also speak of the need for creative abrasion – embracing styles of thinking and working that may be somewhat aversive, but that have the potential to lead to the next innovation. Wetlaufer (1999) points out how companies fall behind when redirectors and re-initiators are let go because they do not fit with the company culture: often they join competitors or form their own start-ups, leaving their original company in the dust. Companies that are unable to manage innovation risk death (Managing Creativity and Innovation, 2003). Gardner (1993, 1994) also described different types of creative contributions individuals can make. They include (a) the solution of a well-defined problem, (b) the devising of an encompassing theory, (c) the creation of a ‘frozen work’, (d) the performance of a ritualized
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work and (e) a ‘high-stakes’ performance. Each of these kinds of contribution tends to be characteristic of a particular field or set of fields. For example, the performance of a ritualized work describes a creative contribution in the arts, such as an artist’s interpretation of a musical composition. Similarly, ‘high stakes’ performances may refer to actions taken by social and political leaders for example while engaging the public in protests. This ‘high stakes’ performance is qualitatively different from that of a ritualized work in that it is more spontaneous and involves solving new and challenging problems on the spot. In contrast, the performance of a ritualized work does not require as much novel contribution on the part of the performer. Although qualitative distinctions exist among these categories of creative contributions, each type is best described as suited to a particular domain rather than being generalizable to creative contributions of all possible domains. Gardner has suggested that these contributions occur in eight domains (corresponding to multiple ‘intelligences’): linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, interpersonal and intrapersonal. A view that is more likely to distinguish among types of creative leaders has been proposed by Gough and Woodworth (1960), who discussed stylistic variations among professional research scientists. The styles include zealots, initiators, diagnosticians, scholars, artificers, estheticians and methodologists. For example, a zealot proposes a cause and then becomes extremely strongly identified with that cause, sometimes with only minimal empirical support for the arguments behind the cause. A methodologist concentrates on and takes great care with the methodology of his or her contributions and perhaps with the innovation inhering in the methodology, possibly at the expense of paying attention to the substantive contribution. These types distinguish differences among individual creators’ preferred working styles, but no predictions are made regarding the nature of the creative contributions such individuals would produce.
Discussion The eight types of creative leadership described above are viewed as qualitatively distinct. However, within each type, there can be quantitative differences. For example, a forward incrementation can represent a fairly small step forward, or a substantial leap. A reinitiation can restart a small sub-field, or an entire field, as did the work of Einstein on rel-
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ativity theory. Thus, the theory distinguishes types of leadership both qualitatively and quantitatively. Of course, the taxonomy we provide is not the only one that has been proposed. Most existing taxonomies do not apply to creative leadership, in particular, but some do. Theorists of creativity and related topics have recognized that there are different types of creative contributions (see reviews in Ochse, 1990; Sternberg, 1988; Weisberg, 1993). For example, Kuhn (1970) distinguished between normal and revolutionary science. Normal science expands upon or otherwise elaborates upon an already existing paradigm of scientific research, whereas revolutionary science proposes a new paradigm. Revolutionary leaders in science have included Newton and Einstein in the field of physics, Darwin and Wallace in the field of biology and Freud and Wundt in the field of psychology. Darwin’s contribution is particularly well analysed by Gruber (1981). Our theory maps into Kuhn’s, in that we view the types of leadership that maintain current paradigms as analogous to normal science, and those paradigms that reject current paradigms as analogous to revolutionary science. Do different types of creative leadership require different abilities? At one level, yes. People who exercise more radical forms of creativity must be better able to generate and cope with novelty (Sternberg, 1997a). They also need to be more open to new kinds of experiences. At another level, no. Creativity is, in part, a decision (Sternberg & Lubart, 1995). People who choose more radical forms of creativity are people who are more willing to take the risk of seriously defying the crowd. They have made a decision that others generally do not make. How does a manager decide which type of creative contribution fits the needs of his or her organization? There is no formula, but there are guidelines. If an organization is doing well and its future trajectory is bright – the bottom line is increasing and prospects are bright – then types of creativity that preserve current paradigms may be preferred. The logic is that there is no sense in fixing what is not broken. If an organization is doing well but its long-term trajectory is not bright, then a weaker form of paradigm-shifting may be necessary, such as a redirection that does not lead one too far from the organization’s present path. If an organization is doing well but its short-term trajectory is at risk, a more radical redirection or re-initiation may be required. And if the company is failing, then one probably has no choice but to break existing paradigms. Not to do so is death. For example, a
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company that defined itself as in the horseand-buggy business, rather than as in the transportation business, is unlikely to have survived the early twentieth century. Companies that defined themselves as typewriter companies (e.g. Smith-Corona) rather than as information-processing companies also have disappeared from the business horizon. In sum, leadership is not creative or not creative. Rather, it can be more or less creative in different ways. What type of creativity will emerge in an organization depends in part upon the leaders, but also in part upon the organizational environment. Some organizations are more susceptible and favourable to change than others (Sternberg, 2002). An organization that resists change is more likely to have kinds of creative leadership that accept existing paradigms (replication, redefinition, forward incrementation). Other kinds of leaders are likely to be fired or to resign. An organization that welcomes change, however, may also welcome creative leadership that rejects existing paradigms (redirection, reconstruction/redirection, re-initiation) or synthesizes them (synthesis). Companies that are failing or in bankruptcy may have no choice but to choose the paradigm-rejecting kinds of creative contributions: their existing structures have failed. Companies that are succeeding may choose less radical types of creativity, but if the market changes, they may have to change as well, regardless of past successes. Different theories have been proposed to characterize different types of creative leadership, primarily in the scientific domain. In this article, we have proposed a propulsion model of types of creative leadership that characterizes some of the ways in which leaders can manifest their creativity. Although single leaders may utilize a mixture of styles, they seem largely to fall into one of these groupings of another. At the very least, they tend to be remembered in a particular way.
Acknowledgements We are grateful to our collaborators in our work on creativity for their contributions to the work upon which this article draws: Todd Lubart, Elena Grigorenko, Linda O’Hara, Wendy Williams, Janet Davidson, Weihua Niu. Preparation of this article was supported by Grant REC-9979843 from the National Science Foundation and by a government grant under the Javits Act Program (Grant No. R206R000001) as administered by the Institute of Educational Sciences, (formerly the Office of Educational Research and Improvement),
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US Department of Education. Grantees undertaking such projects are encouraged to express freely their professional judgement. This article, therefore, does not necessarily represent the positions or the policies of the US government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
References Amabile, T.M. (1999) How to kill creativity. In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 1–28. Bass, B.M. (1998) Transformational leadership: Industrial, military, and educational impact. Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bass, B.M. and Avolio, B.J. (eds) (1994) Improving organizational effectiveness through transformational leadership. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. Bass, B.M., Avolio, B.J. and Atwater, L. (1996) The transformational and transactional leadership of men and women. International Review of Applied Psychology, 45, 5–34. Ciampa, D. and Watkins, M. (2001) The successor’s dilemma. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 111–33. Conger, J.A. and Kanugo, R.N. (1998) Charismatic leadership in organizations. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA. Davenport, T.H., and Beck, J.C. (2001) Getting the attention you need. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 87–110. Drucker, P.F. (1999) The discipline of innovation. In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 154–59. Fryer, B. (2001) Leading through rough times: An interview with Novell’s Eric Schmidt. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 177–95. Gardner, H. (1993) Creating minds. Basic Books, New York. Gardner, H. (1994) The creator’s patterns. In Feldman, D.H., Csikszentmihalyi, M. and Gardner, H. (eds), Changing the world: A framework for the study of creativity. Praeger, Westport, CT, pp. 69–84. Goleman, D. (1998) Working with emotional intelligence. Bantam Books, New York. Goleman, D. (2001a) Leadership that gets results. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 53–85. Goleman, D. (2001b) What makes a leader? In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 1–25. Gough, H.G. and Woodworth, D.G. (1960) Stylistic variations among professional research scientists. Journal of Psychology, 49, 87–98.
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Gruber, H. (1981) Darwin on man: A psychological study of scientific creativity (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kim, W.C. and Mauborgne, R. (1999) The strategic logic of high growth. In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 189–217. Kuhn, T.S. (1970) The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd edn). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Leonard, D. and Rayport, J.F. (1999) Spark innovation through empathic design. In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 29–55. Leonard, D. and Straus, S. (1999) Putting your company’s whole brain to work. In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 57–85. Maccoby, M. (2001) Narcissistic leaders: The incredible pros, the inevitable cons. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 27–52. Managing creativity and innovation (2003) Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA. Ochse, R. (1990) Before the gates of excellence. Cambridge University Press, New York. Peterman, J. (2001) The rise and fall of the J. Peterman Company. In Harvard Business Review on what makes a successful leader. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 135–52. Sashkin, M. (1988) The visionary leader. In Conger, J.A. and Kanugo, R.N. (eds), Charismatic leadership: The elusive factor in organizational effectiveness. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, pp. 122–60. Sternberg, R.J. (ed.) (1988) The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge University Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. (1997a) Successful intelligence. Plume, New York. Sternberg, R.J. (1997b) Thinking styles. Cambridge University Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. (1999) A propulsion model of types of creative contributions. Review of General Psychology, 3, 83–100. Sternberg, R.J. (2002) Effecting organizational change: A ‘mineralogical theory’ of organiza-
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tional modifiability. Consulting Psychology Journal, 54, 147–56. Sternberg, R.J., Kaufman, J.C. and Pretz, J.E. (2001) The propulsion model of creative contributions applied to the arts and letters. Journal of Creative Behavior, 35, 75–101. Sternberg, R.J., Kaufman, J.C. and Pretz, J.E. (2002) The creativity conundrum: A propulsion model of kinds of creative contributions. Psychology Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. and Lubart, T.I. (1995a) Defying the crowd: Cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity. Free Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. and Lubart, T.I. (1995b) Ten keys to creative innovation. R & D Innovator, 4(3), 8–11. Strange, J.M. and Mumford, M.D. (2002) The origins of vision: Charismatic versus ideological leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 13, 343–77. Weber, M. (1968) Max Weber on charisma and institutional building (Eisenstadt, S.N. ed.). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Weisberg, R.W. (1993) Creativity: Beyond the myth of genius. Freeman, New York. Wetlaufer, S. (1999) What’s stifling the creativity at CoolBurst? In Harvard Business Review on breakthrough thinking. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, pp. 117–42.
Robert J. Sternberg is the IBM Professor of Psychology and Education at Yale University, James C. Kaufman is an Associate Professor at California State University, San Bernardino and Jean E. Pretz is an Associate Professor at Illinois Wesleyan University. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Robert J. Sternberg, PACE Center, Yale University, Box 208358, New Haven, CT 06520-8358, USA. Email:
[email protected].
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Two Kinds of Creativity – But Which Ones? Geir Kaufmann It is argued that Kirton’s theory of styles of creativity is conceptually and methodologically unsound. A solution to the conceptual and methodological dilemmas is offered by way of making a clear-cut distinction between novelty on the stimulus and novelty on the response side. This distinction is used as a platform for the development of a new taxonomy of different kinds of creativity and intelligent behaviour. A major feature of this new model is the distinction made between proactive and reactive creativity. The implications of this distinction for opening new avenues for a more differentiated assessment of creativity, as well as for the development of a conceptually firmer and more differentiated platform for developing new practical training programmes in creativity are suggested.
I
s creativity a monolithic, coherent and singular entity, or are there different kinds of creativity? According to Kirton (1976, 1987, 1988, 1994) the concept of creativity may be broken down into two dimensions, conceptualized as different styles of creativity. By making this distinction Kirton paved the way for important new strides in the understanding and development of the concept of creativity. The two styles of creativity are termed ‘adaptive’ and ‘innovative’ creativity. The adaptor prefers to improve things within existing frameworks and existing boundaries. The innovator prefers to do things differently, restructuring problems and frameworks. Rather than viewing this distinction within the broad category of problem solving, Kirton sees it as a distinction between different modes of creativity, which he claims to be orthogonal to level of creativity. It clearly makes sense to think of differences in creativity along these lines. A jazz musician may, for example, be highly creative within an existing genre, such as bebop. Another form of creativity is to develop a new style, such as cool jazz. But are these different kinds of creativity only different in terms of style, or is there also a difference in level here? Another problem with Kirton’s conceptualization is that it is also possible to imagine different levels of frameworks, with the problem solver operating within the framework at a general level, while going beyond the frame-
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work at a more local level. A researcher could, for instance, stay within the existing, information-processing paradigm of cognition, and at the same time go beyond it at the more local level of theory, constituted by the multi-stage theory of memory. Then we are faced with a situation in which the product is both innovative and adaptive at the same time, seen from different perspectives. As far as I can see, Kirton’s theory does not speak to these issues, either conceptually or methodologically. Rather, people are held to fall into to two different categories, to varying degrees, but in absolute terms. It seems then, that Kirton’s theory cannot handle these subtleties because it is basically a structural personality theory, rather than a functional strategy preference theory, in which choice of strategies are just as much contingent on level of framework and type of task. Kirton claims explicitly that adaptors and innovators are different personality types (cf. Isaksen, Lauer & Wilson, 2003), that are pre-wired, very stable and very consistent. Thus, there seems to be no opening for the analysis of flexible strategy shifts, and the possibility of working with different strategies at the same time at various levels of a problem framework. This is logically required under the concept of cognitive styles, which is not a personality trait, but rather a crossroad concept between personality and cognition, that may serve to integrate the two in important ways, and to demon© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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strate its legitimacy as a construct by its capacity to explain variance incremental to both of these variables, (e.g. Martinsen & Kaufmann, 2000). Under closer scrutiny, serious conceptual and empirical problems also appear when Kirton insists in drawing his distinction in an absolute way within the domain of creativity. Kirton (1988) describes those with adaptive creative preferences as sound, reliable, disciplined, dependable and , indeed, conformist, as becomes clear from the following quote: adaptors abide by Rule Conformity (impersonal structure) to better solve their problems. They accept Group Conformity (staying within personal and informal structure) to ensure group cohesion and collaboration in problem solving . . . adaptors use agreed structure to solve problems. The more adaptive abide by both rule and group structure in order to make changes efficiently. (Kirton, 1988, pp. 67–8) We may, indeed, question what kind of creativity this is. The description above seems more appropriately to denote ‘uncreativity’ or even ‘countercreativity’. The serious point here is the stretch that is required for the concept of creativity. If the term ‘creativity’ is to cover the whole range of behaviour from patient conformity to visionary, and ingenious paradigm breaking, the burning question is what creativity is not. It seems that this question would be a difficult one to answer, and that Kirton’s concept of creativity is virtually unconstrained, and comes down to the populist theory of ‘everybody is creative’, which has been appropriately criticised by Arieti (1976). The problems involved in Kirton’s distinction are also seen under a closer examination of the concepts of innovative and adaptive creativity. Whereas innovative problem solving logically requires creativity, adaptive problem solving has no such conceptually integral links to the concept of creativity. It could be just ‘efficient’ or ‘intelligent’. Indeed, this is how this mode of problem solving is generally described by Kirton. Thus from a purely conceptual point of view, innovative and adaptive modes of problem solving cannot be treated as symmetrically distributed over levels of creativity. To uphold the distinction, it is minimally required that there is no, or merely a very small correlation between the postulated styles of creativity and measures of level of creativity. The way this is done by Kirton is to factor analyse scores on different tests of level of creativity, such as divergent thinking tasks with KAI along with other self-report measures or aspects of creative personality. A par-
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ticularly illustrating example is provided in a study reported by Kirton (1988, p. 67). Here performance tests of creativity, in the form of divergent thinking tasks (Torrance tests) are correlated with a number of various questionnaire-based measures of creativity as a personality trait, along with the KAI as a questionnaire-based measure of style of creativity. It is found that the divergent thinking tasks, assumed to be a level measure of creativity, load on a factor separate from the factor where KAI has its highest loadings, along with other questionnairebased measures of creativity. But this procedure clearly involves confounding of trait and method, and it is impossible to tell whether the orthogonality observed here is a function of the traits measured or the qualitatively different methods used to measure the putative traits of style and level. What is needed in order to establish independency of A-I style from level is to compare style and level with comparable, ideally identical methods. This could for example be done by doing 360-degree assessment of individuals, where the assessors are randomly divided into two groups, where one group is instructed to assess the individual in terms of level of creativity and the other group is asked to assess them in terms of A-I styles. A strong correlation here would indicate that the putative A-I styles are seriously confounded with level. Independence would be established by low or no significant correlations. Moreover, the innovative orientation, as measured by the KAI self-report questionnaire, is, in fact, significantly, and often substantially positively correlated with various indicators of level of creativity measured by objective performance methods (Goldsmith & Matherly, 1987; Isaksen & Puccio, 1988; Kaufmann, 1988a). This raises the question of whether the KAI measure of cognitive styles really is an indicator of level of creativity, more than anything else. Inspection of the item correlation matrix of the KAI items also seems to suggest that there is a pattern conforming to a simplex structure (e.g. Jøreskog, 1978), indicating that KAI indirectly measures a level factor. A controlled analysis of the internal structure of KAI to check for this alternative interpretation of what KAI really measures has not been performed by Kirton. Indeed, the results of KAI research suggest very much the same kind of relationships as have been obtained for measures of creative personality traits, as well as other cognitive measures of creativity. The studies are rarely performed in such a way that level of creativity can be partialled out. Rather, it seems to be taken for granted that the orthogonality of KAI styles and level of
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creativity has been settled. Thus, it is a disturbing possibility that KAI research to a large extent consists in reproducing what we already know about creative personality traits and conformity behaviour. Is there, then, no way to make the distinction between styles of creativity, as Kirton was the first to suggest in an explicit and systematic way. I think there is, and as an alternative to Kirton’s theory, I suggest that a distinction between different modes of creativity may be extracted from a conceptual analysis of different aspects of novelty involved in problem solving. In previous work (Kaufmann, 1993, 2003) the concept of novelty was explored, and the following is a recapitulation and further expansion of these discussions.
What do We Really Mean by ‘Novelty’? What do scholars have in mind when they point to novelty as a key defining criterion of creativity? Taken in its most literate sense, novelty means something that has never happened before, or something that has never been done previously. In this strict sense of the term novelty, we are referring to what we may call objective novelty. Boden (1994) refers to this conception as historical creativity or H-creativity. Hausman (1987) argues that the concept of creativity requires invoking the concept of ‘radical novelty’, in order to distinguish it from trivial forms of novelty, for instance in the form of minimal differences and variations. From this position he argues in favour of the following points: (a) the requirement of radical novelty raises the question of whether an explanation could be found that would specify and predict the newness or intelligibility of this event, rather than the trivial newness of simple differences, and (b) the requirement of value also raises the question of whether an explanation could be found that could foresee the values that contribute to created outcomes. It is somewhat unclear from Hausman’s exposition of his arguments what exactly is meant by ‘radical novelty’, i.e. if it refers only to objective novelty, but it is clear that the concept implies that a completely new idea or product has been created, and that the creation in question is of a particularly high magnitude. The strictures imposed on the creativity concept by the requirement of objective novelty have been criticized above. When the concept pertains to the magnitude of the novelty, like creating a new genre in art, a new paradigm in scientific research or a completely new
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kind of technology, the concept of radical newness is not desirable, because it exalts the concept to almost divine proportions and also runs against the concept of degrees of creativity that is meaningful and should be preserved. The point made by Hausman to the effect that we can never foresee the values operating in the judgement of a product as creative seems to confound the ‘scientifics’ and the ‘politics’ involved in the creativity enterprise. The scientific ambition is to state the general conditions that maximize the probability for creative accomplishments to take place. There is no reason this cannot be done independent of the specific creativity values. A solution to the problems raised above is to settle for subjective novelty as sufficient to most of the needs involved in the scientific pursuit of creativity. Thus, an idea deserves to be described as original if it is novel for the individual who produces it, without necessarily being novel for society as a whole (e.g. Boden, 1994; Kaufmann, 1993; Welsch, 1973). In Boden’s terms we can base our inquiries into the core issues of creativity by examining psychological, or P-creativity.
How Much Novelty? The problems surrounding the question of the level or magnitude of novelty of an idea or product that is required to qualify as genuinely creative are certainly not easy to answer. At the lowest level, novelty could be taken to mean just ‘different’. But as Hausman (1987) and Boden (1994) point out, this would make everything novel, because every single thing is in principle different from all things in the past. At the very least, each entity exists in a different time or location. One step up the ladder, Weisberg (1988, 1993, 1999) argued for a problem-solving perspective on creativity and made the claim that any solution to a problem is creative as long as it is novel and fulfils the requirements of the task. The basic idea seems to be that of a continuum of creativity, ranging from minimal to maximal novelty in problem solution. This approach has considerable intuitive appeal, and the concept of degrees of creativity certainly makes good sense. We are, however, left hanging as far as determining where to set the minimum level of novelty in order to employ the concept of creativity. On closer examination other difficulties also arise, suggesting that the concept formulated by Weisberg may be too crude and in need of some constraining qualifications. In addition to the problem of locating the minimum threshold-level of
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novelty, there is no opening for a distinction between styles of creativity, and another basic complication for such a straightforward novelty conception of creativity is its failure to distinguish the concept of creativity from the concept of intelligence.
The Collision between Intelligence and Creativity In his seminal analysis of the concept of intelligence, Spearman (1927) emphasized the ability to create novel mental content as the essential hallmark of intelligence. Sternberg (1985), and more recently, Gardner and Sternberg (1994) have pointed to task novelty as the basic dimension in the intelligence domain. In an exceptionally thorough analysis of the concept of intelligence, Gregory (1981) singled out two features as hallmarks of intelligent behaviour: 1. An intelligent solution must have some novelty, at least for the person that produces it. Merely reproducing what already exists does not display intelligence, at least as I wish to use the term. 2. An intelligent solution must be in some degree successful. (Gregory, 1981, p. 299) Through the claim that ‘successful novelty’ should be seen as the basic defining characteristic of intelligent behaviour, Gregory moved the construct of intelligence to a point where it is really too close for comfort in terms of cohabiting with standard definitions of the concept of creativity along the lines suggested by Weisberg (1988, 1993), and indeed, by most authors in the field (e.g. Runco, 2004). On the conceptual level, the standard construct of intelligence does not intrinsically involve creativity. Few will endorse the idea that straightforward analytic reasoning necessarily implies imagination and creativity. In line with this contention, the main thrust of extensive empirical research seems to be that analytical and creative abilities, whilst correlated, split into significantly different sources of variance (e.g. Getzels & Jackson, 1962; Lubart, 2003; Sternberg, 1985, 1988, 2000; Wallach & Wing, 1969). Some even argue that, under closer scrutiny, the two constructs are fundamentally independent processes (e.g. Hayes, 1989). It seems clear, then, that the concept of creativity has to be linked to novelty in a way that distinguishes it legitimately and meaningfully from the concept of intelligence. A possible option would be to retain a unitary novelty concept, and simply locate creativity at the upper end of this continuum. However, this
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solution requires a highly arbitrary decision as to where intelligence ends and creativity begins. To solve this problem, some scholars in the field have argued that the term creativity should be reserved, as noted earlier, for the phenomenon of ‘radical newness’. Hausman (1987) argued that creativity should be restricted to accomplishments containing ‘Novelty Proper’, which he defines as ‘a difference in intelligibility or character’ (p. 382). It is not exactly clear what such radical novelty entails. From the examples given, it seems primarily to relate to high-level creative feats like a shift in scientific paradigm or the creation of a new artistic genre, or at least a totally new way of thinking about a concept, process or product. From the vantage point of the task environment, Raaheim (1974, 1985) argues that intelligence essentially deals with the transformation of partly unfamiliar situations into familiar and tractable situations and reserves the term creativity for total task novelty, where a familiar pattern is no longer recognizable. This seems to be the solution that Gardner and Sternberg (1994) also opt for, when they claim, with reference to the work of Raaheim (1974, 1985) that intelligence is best captured at the medium ranges of novelty, where the opportunity for people to make intelligent use of their previous knowledge is optimal. When the task contains so much novelty that ‘the individual cannot find any relationship between the current situation and past experience’, (Gardner & Sternberg, 1994, p. 39), intelligence, by definition, is not applicable. Furthermore, they claim that ‘While such situations may be poor measures of intelligence, they may be good measures of creativity, in that they require a completely unique approach for their solution’ (p. 40). By requiring radical novelty on the stimulus or the response side, the concept of creativity stands out as clearly separate from the concept of intelligence, and a tight and clear demarcation of the creativity domain is, in principle, possible to uphold. This line of thinking may, however, be criticized for leading to an excessively constricted and exclusive definition of creativity. By placing the concept of creativity at the ‘Einsteinian’ level, so to speak, the theorists above may exclude a large domain of activities that seem clearly to entail creativity, as ordinarily and reasonably conceived. Such a position also turns the concept of creativity into an ‘all-or-nothing’ phenomenon, which is difficult to reconcile with the concept of degrees of creativity – a notion that is deeply entrenched, makes good sense and should be preserved. The Raaheim and Gardner-Sternberg solution also entails some basic difficulties. By
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pushing the domain of creativity beyond the upper threshold of recognizable familiarity, creativity becomes a neo-Darwinian process, in which the generative stage consists in a random, trial-and-error-like production of responses that are subsequently screened for possible value. This manoeuvre shifts the emphasis of importance in the act of creation completely from the generation to the evaluation process (cf. Briskman, 1980; Campbell, 1960; Skinner, 1953). Johnson-Laird (1987) and Boden (1994) have pointed out, however, that a neo-Darwinian process is grossly inefficient and at odds with natural properties of cognitive mechanisms. A mechanism that applies some criteria in the generation stages and others in the subsequent selective stages seems to be a much more sensible and likely model for the processes that are involved in acts of creativity. Furthermore, the Raaheim and Gardner-Sternberg view is one-sided in the sense that creativity is linked exclusively to new task environments. However, creativity frequently occurs in response to a highly familiar task, where a new twist is made, resulting in a novel and creative solution (cf. Kaufmann, 1988b; Nonaka, 1994). The question remains, then, where to place the concept of creativity between two extremes, one viewing creativity as being involved in every little piece of novel change and the other restricting creativity to highly spectacular kinds of novelty, either in terms of the tasks environment to be handled, or in the form of the solution achieved, or both of these.
The Passage between Scylla and Charybdis In our view, a navigable passage is through the route recommended by Newell, Shaw and Simon (1979), who qualified the notion of novelty by restricting it to cases of unconventional thinking. A modification or rejection of previously accepted ideas in addition to novelty is, according to this view, required in establishing an act as creative. Similar views have been expressed by Stein (1974), discussing a ‘leap’ away from what has previously existed as a fundamental criterion, and Briskman (1980) claimed that creative accomplishments are characterized as being in conflict with an existing background, aiming at its modification. Such a view has also been advocated by Sternberg and Lubart (1995), and emphasized recently even more strongly by Sternberg (2001). Recently, Boden (1994) re-inforced such a distinction when she singled out the domain of creativity proper as being activity involved
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in replacing an existing generative system of rules for a certain conceptual space with a new and different one. As an example she points to the development of classical music, which originally relied on a ‘home key’. Here the melody started and also had to finish. This scheme was gradually stretched more and more and then dropped altogether by Arnold Schoenberg, who suggested new types of constraints to structure in music-making, such as using every note in the chromatic scale. The combined requirements of novelty and unconventionality may be seen as offering a possible solution to the conceptual problems discussed above: 1. There is no confounding of the concepts of intelligence and creativity because the concept of intelligence does not require reasoning to be unconventional. 2. The concept of creativity can be applied both to high task novelty, where there is no previously accepted solution ready at hand, and to high solution novelty, which requires modification or rejection of previously accepted ideas. This accords well with the view that problem finding, that is, the development of new problem formulations, is a cardinal component of the creative process (e.g. Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Getzels & Csikszentmihalyi, 1976; Mackworth, 1965; Unsworth, 2001). 3. Creativity is not restricted to rare, highlevel ‘breakthroughs’ that are implied by the notion of ‘radical newness’. Neither is the concept applicable to any small difference relative to the existing state of affairs. Stein (1987) warns about the hazards involved in generalizing from what he calls ‘Creativity little c’ to ‘Creativity Big C’. The way of constraining the concept of creativity advocated here may be seen as lessening the tension in this potential conflict, at least to some degree. At the same time, the notion of degrees of creativity remains intact. Creativity may range from a low level, as for instance in solving a typical insight problem, to the very high level involved in the shift of genres involved in science and art. 4. The notion of creativity does not necessarily presuppose the inefficient and ‘contrarational’ mechanism of a neo-Darwinian, trial-and-error type of process.
Expanding the Perspective on Creativity, Novelty and Intelligence We have argued that in the creativity literature there is considerable confusion about where to
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place the locus of novelty in intelligence and creativity. Gardner and Sternberg (1994) interestingly point to two kinds of novelty that they describe as ‘novelty of component mental operation’ and ‘novelty of the content of the task’. Making us aware of the fact that ‘novelty’ may not come down to ‘one thing’ is worthwhile. However, the distinction does not seem to be readily applicable in our effort to clarify the distinction between the concepts of creativity and intelligence. It is also unclear what the ‘novelty of component mental operations’ really means. Does it refer to the peculiar nature of the mechanisms involved in creativity, such as incubation and the like, or does it relate to the product of the process, i.e. the solution to the problem? Here we will distinguish between two kinds of novelty in a very straightforward way. There is novelty on the stimulus and novelty on the response side. Making this straightforward distinction offers us the opportunity to clarify even further the conceptual domains of intelligence and creativity, as well as enabling us to point out some major differences between different kinds of creativity, which may help clarify the nature of major issues involved in creativity research. As seen from Figure 1, we may now distinguish between four different categories involving different combinations of tasks nov-
elty (novelty on the stimulus side) and novelty in the solutions required (response novelty).
Familiar Task – Familiar Solution In this category we find typical routine problem solving, involving standard operating procedures (SOPs). This could, for example be routines for ordering new products, routine procedures for adjusting prices, using a known formula to solve a familiar equation in mathematics, making a standard opening move in chess, etc.. Little creativity is involved in this kind of problem-solving endeavour, albeit sometimes we may be confronted with small, but important deviations to be adjusted either on the task or the solution side.
Novel Task – Familiar Solution This is an interesting category. In our view, this is the conceptual home base of intelligence proper. By definition, intelligence refers to the activity of employing previous experience in new task situations. As Gardner and Sternberg (1994) point out, tasks of rule induction and rule deduction are the kind of tests that are most representative of the function of intelligence, also seen in a circumplex model as the tasks at the centre of batteries of intelligence tasks. We may call this category ‘adaptive
High Intelligent
Reactive
adaptation
creativity
Routine
Proactive
problem solving
creativity
Task Novelty
Low
Low High
Solution Novelty
Figure 1. The Novelty-Creativity Taxonomy
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intelligence’ because we are here dealing with tasks that, despite their novelty, are amenable to solutions derived from an existing generative rule system for a given problem space. This line of reasoning also seems to be in line with recent views expressed by Sternberg (2001).
Familiar Task – Novel Solution Now we are moving into a category that might, on first appearance, seem rather strange. Why should we make the effort to develop a new solution to a familiar situation that we have met before and know how to handle? As pointed out previously (Kaufmann, 1980), problem solving does not only involve transforming an unfamiliar situation into a familiar one, as argued by Raaheim (1974), and implicitly by Gardner and Sternberg (1994). In a very important sense it also involves transforming a familiar situation into an unfamiliar one! Here we are presented with a paradox between theory and practice. As we have argued previously (Kaufmann, 1980, 1988, 1995, 2003), psychological theory of problem solving traditionally has been, and still is, dominated by a paradigm of reactive responding, in the sense that the given, or initial situation explicitly or implicitly is seen to exist in the form of some ‘disturbance’, ‘deviation’, ‘difficulty’, ‘conflict’ or ‘uncertainty’ with respect to finding the means to reach a goal. On this view, the individual is seen as having to be triggered by this kind of disturbance in order to act. This perspective is most clearly seen in the traditional behaviourist treatment of problem solving. But it is also evident in Piaget’s cognitive theory of equilibration through the adaptive processes of assimilation and accommodation (cf. Arlin, 1975; Kaufmann, 1995 for empirical evidence and conceptual arguments bearing on this critique). As Nonaka (1994) has argued, these general assumptions also seem to underlie the standard information processing input-output perspective that has dominated modern cognitive psychology in recent years, and has also conquered significant shares of the organizational theory. Nonaka (1994) states bluntly that such a paradigm is simply not capable of explaining the process of innovation. This may be stretching the argument a little too far. But such views of problem solving do entail serious difficulties in capturing some essential aspects of creativity and innovation. In order to get a competitive edge, companies constantly have to try to find inadequacies in existing products and technologies compared to a vision of a future desired state that
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involves an improvement over the status quo. As an example, imagine existing TV technology. The standard TV set has a fixed sized monitor, which people seem to accept as natural. There is nothing inherently ‘wrong’ or ‘disturbing’ or ‘deviating’ about this technology. But if we create a vision of a future state of affairs that offers a flexible-sized monitor, which could be adjusted to small size or large size according to our needs and desires, we may realize that we have created a disturbance or deviation by comparing the existing state of affairs to a future possible, and potentially improved, state of affairs. In this scenario, we may argue that what we are doing is trying to find a new solution to a familiar situation. In this process, the most interesting part of creativity is first to find an interesting new problem to engage our imagination and to enable us to innovate. This process of first finding an interesting new problem, through envisioning a possible, desired future state of affairs as a step toward finding new solutions to problems may be called proactive creativity (see also Heinzen, 1999; Unsworth, 2001, for a similar argument, based on different conceptual frameworks). It is readily seen that this kind of creative problem solving, proceeding through the gates of new and smart problem finding, is at the very heart of the concept of creativity that was considered prototypical. Surprisingly, very little is known about this aspect of creativity, which may be due to the constraints put on the concept of creative problem solving in the traditional theoretical paradigms. Also, this kind of process is more difficult to study, as Unsworth (2001) points out, then in the typical case of a controlled laboratory situation, where the experimenter presents the task to be solved. Here the most interesting element is for the individual to find an interesting task for him, or herself.
Novel Task – Novel Solution The final category in the present creativitynovelty taxonomy is given in the situation where there is high novelty on the task situation coupled with a requirement for a novel solution. At first glance, this appears to be the one category that requires the most creativity, because there is novelty both on the stimulus and the response side. But this is not necessarily the case. As there is novelty on the task level, this represents a more or less explicit cue that a novel solution is required. In this sense, there is an external driver that actively triggers the individual to consider whether a novel solution is required. This is different from the previous case, which involves breaking through the appearance of familiarity and sta-
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bility in order to break it down to generate an interesting novel problem. In addition, the individual has to find an appropriate novel solution after the creation of the novel problem. The novel task-novel solution scenario is an important one. Under controlled laboratory situations it is illustrated through the classical Einstellung effect in problem solving (e.g. Luchins, 1942), where individuals first solve a series of problems according to a certain formula. They are then confronted with a slightly deviating task that can be solved according to the old formula, but are more easily solved through a new formula. A large number of participants in these experiments continue to use the old complicated formula, rather than the newer, more convenient one. In the next stage of the process, a new problem is presented, that cannot be solved according to the standard formula, but is easily solved through a new and simple formula. The results show that a surprisingly large number of people are not able to solve this simple problem, because of the new accommodations in solution finding required. This kind of scenario resembles strongly what is called the success trap in organizational learning and problem solving, when organizations come to over-rely on their own past experience and are consequently unable to adjust to new demands and challenges (e.g. Espedal, 2002a, 2002b; Lewinthal & March, 1993). As an example, we could imagine a manager who had great success in a company that entered into a radical new, virtual organizational style. The old form of leadership would probably have to be significantly reshaped in this new leadership situation. In the creativity literature, Amabile (1983, 1996) has always been a champion of the idea that looking at the factors that obstruct creativity may be the most fruitful perspective. We can now see that this angle is particularly pertinent in the novel task–novel solution scenario. In this problem category, creative problem solving also becomes closely intertwined with the single and double-loop learning described by Argyris (1995). Single-loop learning premised on doing the same type of action in an improved and more efficient way, now has to be substituted by double-loop learning, where fundamental assumptions underlying established practices are re-examined. The task novelty – solution novelty situation may be termed reactive creativity, because actual changes in the external situation that are brought about for different reasons trigger the search for novel solutions. In this category we may posit that problem sensitivity, in the
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sense of being able to see that real and important changes actually have taken place, or are taking place is a most important quality. The problem has been addressed primarily at the conceptual and theoretical level (e.g. Lai & Grønhaug, 1995). Many years ago, Guilford (1967) talked about problem sensitivity as a potentially interesting sort of ability, which had to do with implications in the product category in his model. Since then, however, there have been no new serious attempts at operationalizing the concept as a candidate for a potentially interesting and important problem-solving ability. In a new research programme (Kaufmann & Meland, 2002), signal detection theory is being employed as a model for developing diagnostic situations of problem detection ability. The context is a military one, and the participants are presented with scenarios that, through consensual validation from experts, are categorized as (a) real problems that appear like problems, (b) real problems that do not appear like problems, (c) problems that are not real problems, but are subjectively perceived as problems and (d) problems that are not problems and are not subjectively perceived as problems. In this way, the programme hopes to be able to diagnose accuracy in problem detection ability. So far the results are promising, and seem to suggest that there are consistent and reliable individual differences in the ability to make valid problem detection, e.g. perceiving that there is a problem, when the problem does not appear like a problem in its surface presentation (hits) and avoiding false alarms to the effect of being able to see that a scenario that has the appearance of a problem, really is not. We believe that more research along these lines may throw new light on the nature and determining conditions of problem sensitivity, and possibly also bring forward new diagnostic and training implications for the purpose of better handling the category of novel task – novel solutions. It should also be mentioned that the heuristics and bias tradition is particularly rich on concepts, theories and empirical findings that are clearly relevant to research in this category of creative problem solving (Bazerman, 2002; Gilovich, Griffin & Kahneman, 2002; Plous, 1993). In a recent work, Kilbourne and Woodman (1999) present a lucid and creative discussion on how to link reasoning biases to the issue of what kind of psychological and organizational barriers prevent people from realizing that novel circumstances have occurred or are about to occur, that have to be addressed with novel solutions.
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We believe strongly that the current paradigms of cognitive styles are conceptually problematic, or limited in their scope, and suggest that the scheme outlined here may be operationalized and employed in such a way that our knowledge and ability to manage different forms of creativity may be significantly enhanced.
Conclusions It seems most appropriate to conclude that Kirton made important strides in the advancement of the conceptualization of creativity, when he made his distinction between styles and levels of creativity in his seminal article (Kirton, 1976). This was, indeed, an ingenious twist that fully satisfies the definition of creativity, at a high level, that has been promoted in the present paper. Rarely does one hit the bull’s-eye at the first shot at concretizing a novel concept. We have argued above that the original theory of adaptor-innovator styles of creativity is, indeed, in trouble, both conceptually, methodologically and empirically. We have argued here that the style distinction within creativity is much more aptly made by distinguishing between novelty on the stimulus and the response side. Emerging from an analysis of the implications of such a distinction is the difference in style between proactive and reactive creativity that is firmly anchored in a conceptually consistent model. Several interesting new implications arise from this model. From an operational point of view, we can point to new and interesting ways of testing creativity with the concept of proactive creativity in mind. We could present individuals with a familiar situation, which could be a traditional object, like the TV set mentioned above, a standard procedure of billing customers and so on, and ask the participants to challenge the assumptions underlying these familiar objects, procedures or scenarios, by pointing to important limitations that could be used as a platform to create novel, future desired states that could be realized through more standard ways of creative problemsolving. We could split this process into two stages, creating the discrepancy, and then finding an appropriate solution for it. Thus we can obtain separate measures of both the ‘destructive’ as well as the ‘constructive’ processes of creativity. It is certainly an interesting issue whether these two different aspects of creativity are governed by different conditions, and what kind of correlation there is between the two. Another way of operationalizing poten-
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tially interesting personality attributes for this kind of creativity has been developed by Bateman and Crant (1993) in their concept of the proactive personality. The concept of reactive creativity sets the stage for a renewed interest in the concept of problem sensitivity and problem detection that can be rigorously conceptualized and studied employing the advanced theories and methods of signal detection theory. From a practical point of view, we believe that further developing and specifying the concepts of proactive and reactive creativity in terms of specific procedures and systematic techniques may lay the ground for even stronger and more systematic training programmes in the field of creativity.
Implications for Managers The KAI measure of adaptors and innovators is frequently used by consultants and recommended as a measure of two different kinds of creativity. If the arguments above are valid, it seems more likely that KAI really is an indirect indicator of level of creativity. As such it may be a good indicator, but HRM managers who specifically wishes to assess individuals on level of creativity should know that there are, indeed, a host of promising alternative measures of level of creativity, that may provide more extensive, accurate and valid assessments of an individual’s level of creativity (e.g. Sternberg, 1998). If a proactive form of creativity is particularly required as an asset in the organization’s general problem-solving capacity, HRM managers may consider the alternative assessment procedure developed by Bateman and Crant (1993), which has stood up well to critical examinations of validity for assessing specific qualites involved in this particular, and important kind of creativity. For top management in general we will suggest that a more specific and contextually relevant development of the activities included in the kinds of problem solving described in the conceptual taxonomy developed here may be and helpful addition to strategic SWOT analyses, i.e. systematic analyses of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that face the organization, particularly those organizations that are involved in efforts of globalization, due to the diverse environments they will have to operate in. Such SWOT analyses consists among other things in taking stock of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization in term of core competence, synergy and value creation, as a basis for implementing changes in leadership/culture, structure, human resources and
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information and control systems (e.g. Daft, 2003). We believe that the single most important asset of any organization is its capacity for problem solving with regard to its central missions, goals and strategies. The taxonomy developed here describes, and prescribes four major types of problem solving that are all important in the business of creating a competitive advantage for the organization. Adding to and specifying theses activities in a systematic, and contextually pertinent way to the traditional content of a SWOT analysis, we believe may augment the force of such an analysis to the benefit of further developing the organization’s problem-solving capabilities.
References Amabile, T.M. (1983) The social psychology of creativity. Springer Verlag, New York. Amabile, T.M. (1996) Creativity in context: Update to ‘The social psychology of creativity’. Westview, Boulder, CO. Arieti, S. (1976) Creativity: The magic synthesis. Basic Books, New York. Argyris, C. (1995) On organizational learning. Blackwell, Cambridge, MA. Arlin, P.K. (1975) Cognitive development in adulthood: A fifth stage? Developmental Psychology, 11, 602–6. Barron, F. (1988) Putting creativity to work. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 76–98. Bateman, T.S. and Crant, J.M. (1993) The proactive component of organizational behavior: A measure and correlates. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 14, 103–18. Bazerman, M.H. (2002) Judgment in managerial decision making. Wiley, New York. Briskman, L. (1980) Creative product and creative process in science and art. Inquiry, 23, 83–106. Boden, M.A. (1994) What is creativity? In Boden, M.A. (ed.), Dimensions of creativity. MIT Press, Boston, MA, pp. 76–117. Campbell, D. (1960) Blind variation and selective retention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes. Psychological Review, 67, 380–400. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988) Motivation and creativity: Toward a synthesis of structural and energistic approaches to cognition. New Ideas in Psychology, 6, 159–76. Daft, R.L. (2003) Management. Thomson, SouthWestern West, Mason, Ohio. Espedal, B. (2002a) The success trap in organizational learning: Cognitive and political explanations. Unpublished Manuscript, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Espedal, B. (2002b) Higher level and lower learning in organizations: Conditions and mechanisms for balancing. Unpublished Manuscript, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration.
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Gardner, M.K. and Sternberg, R.J. (1994) Novelty and intelligence. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Mind in context. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 38–71. Getzels, F. and Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1976) The creative vision. Wiley, New York. Getzels, J.W. and Jackson, P.W. (1962) Creativity and intelligence: Explorations with gifted students. Wiley, New York. Goldsmith, R.E. and Matherly, T.K. (1987) Adaption-Innovation and creativity: A replication and extension. British Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 79–82. Gilovich, T., Griffin, D. and Kahneman, D. (2002) Heuristics and biases: The psychology of intuitive judgment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA. Gregory, R.L. (1981) Mind in science. Penguin Books, Middlesex. Grønhaug, K. and Kaufmann, G. (1988) Innovation: A cross disciplinary perspective. Norwegian Universities Press/Oxford University Press, Oslo and Oxford. Guilford, J.P. (1950) Creativity. American Psychologist, 5, 444–54. Guilford, J.P. (1967) The nature of human intelligence. McGraw-Hill, New York. Hausman, C.R. (1987) Philosophical perspectives on the study of creativity. In Isaksen, S.G. (ed.). Frontiers of creativity research: Beyond the basics. Bearly Limited, Buffalo, NY pp. 380–89. Hayes, J.R. (1989) Cognitive processes in creativity. In Glover, J.A., Ronning, R.R. and Reynolds, C.R. (eds.), Handbook of creativity. Plenum, New York pp. 135–45. Heinzen, T.E. (1999) Proactive creativity. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S.R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity Vol. 1. Academic Press, New York pp. 429– 34. Isaksen, S.G. (1987) Frontiers of creativity research: Beyond the basics. Bearly Limited, Buffalo, NY. Isaksen, S.G. and Puccio, G.J. (1988) AdaptionInnovation and the Torrance tests of creative thinking: The level-style issue revisited. Psychological Reports, 63, 659–70. Jøreskog, K.G. (1978) Analyzing psychological data by structural analysis of covariance matrices. In Atkinson, R.C., Krantz, D.H., Luce, R.D. and Suppes, P. (eds.), Contemporary developments in mathematical psychology, Vol. 2. Freeman Company, San Francisco. Johnson-Laird, P.N. (1987) Reasoning, imagining and creating. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 40, 121–29. Kaufmann, A. (1988) Antisosial atferd [Antisocial behaviour]. Sigma Forlag, Bergen. Kaufmann, G. (1980) Imagery, language and thought. Norwegian Universities Press, Oslo. Kaufmann, G. (1988) Problem solving and creativity. In Grønhaug, K. and Kaufmann, G. (eds.), Innovation: A cross-disciplinary perspective. Norwegian Universities Press/Oxford University Press, Oslo pp. 87–132. Kaufmann, G. (1993) The content and logical structure of creativity concepts: An inquiry into the conceptual foundations of creativity research. In Isaksen, S.G., Murdock, M., Firestien, R. and
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Treffinger D. (eds.), Understanding and recognizing creativity. Ablex, Norwood, NJ pp. 141–57. Kaufmann, G. (1995) A theory of cognitive strategy preferences. In Kaufmann, G., Helstrup, T. and Teigen, K.H. (eds.), Problem solving and cognitive processes. Fagbokforlaget, Bergen pp. 45–76. Kaufmann, G. (2003) What to measure? A new look at the concept of creativity. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 47, 235–51. Kaufmann, G. and Meland, N.T. (2002). The psychophysics of problem solving. Unpublished Manuscript, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration. Kilbourn, L.M. and Woodman, R.W. (1999) Barriers to organizational creativity. In Purser, R.E. and Montuori, A. (eds.), Social creativity. Vol. II. Hampton, Creskill, NJ pp. 125–50. Kirton, M.J. (1976) Adaptors and innovators: A description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61, 622–29. Kirton, M.J. (1987) Adapters and innovators: Cognitive style and creativity. In Isaksen, S.G. (ed.). Frontiers of creativity research: Beyond the basics. Beady Limited, Buffalo. NY pp. 282–308. Kirton, M.J. (1988) Adaptors and Innovators: Problem solvers in organizations. In Grønhaug, K. and Kaufmann, G. (eds.), Innovation: A cross-disciplinary approach. Norwegian Universities Press, Oslo pp. 65–85. Kirton, M.J. (ed.) (1994) Adaptors and innovators. Styles of creativity and problem solving. Routledge, London. Kirton, M.J. (1999) Kirton Adaption-innovation Inventory feedback booklet. Occupational Research Centre, Berkhamsted, UK. Isaksen, S.G., Lauer, K.J. and Wilson, G.V. (2003) An examination of the relationships between personality type and cognitive style. Creativity Research Journal, 15, 343–354. Kirton, M.J. (1988) Adapters and Innovators: Problem solvers in organizations. In Grønhaug, K. and Kaufmann, G. (eds.), Innovation: A crossdisciplinary approach. Norwegian Universities Press, Oslo pp. 65–85. Lai, L. and Grønhaug, K. (1995) Managerial problem finding: Conceptual issues and research findings. In Kaufmann, G., Helstrup, T. and Teigen, K.H. (eds.), Problem solving and cognitive processes. Fagbokforlaget, Bergen pp. 487–511. Lewinthal, D.A. and March, J.G. (1993) The myopia of learning. Strategic Management Journal, 14, 95–112. Lubart, T. (2003) In search of creative intelligence. In Sternberg, R.J., Lautrey, J. and Lubart, T.L. (eds.), Models of intelligence: International perspectives. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC pp. 279–92. Luchins, A.S. (1942) The mechanization of problem solving: The effects of Einstellung. Psychological Monographs 54, 1–95. MacKinnon, D.W. (1962) The nature and nurture of creative talent. American Psychologist, 17, 484–95. Mackworth, N.H. (1965) Originality. American Psychologist, 20, 51–66. Martinsen, Ø. and Kaufmann, G. (2000) The Assimilator-Explorer cognitive styles and their relationship to affective-motivational orientations and cognitive performances. In Riding, R.J. and
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Rayner, S. (eds.), International perspectives on individual differences. Volume 1. Cognitive styles. Ablex Publishing Corporation, Stamford, CT pp. 3–39. Newell, A., Shaw, J.C. and Simon, H.A. (1979) The process of creative thinking. In Simon, H.A. (ed.), Models of thought. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT pp. 144–74. Nonaka, I. (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science, 5, 14–37. Ochse, R. (1990) Before the gates of excellence: The determinants of creative genius. Cambridge University Press, New York. Plous, S. (1993) The psychology of judgement and decision making. McGraw-Hill, New York. Raaheim, K. (1974) Problem solving and intelligence. Norwegian Universities Press, Oslo. Raaheim, K. (1985) Why intelligence is not enough. Sigma Forlag, Bergen, Norway. Runco, M. (2004) Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 657–87. Skinner, B.F. (1953) Science and human behaviour. Macmillan, New York. Spearman, C. (1927) The abilities of man: Their nature and measurement. Macmillan, London. Stein, M.I. (1974) Stimulating creativity. Vol. l: Individual procedures. Academic, New York. Stein, M.I. (1987) Creativity at the crossroads: A 1985 perspective. In Isaksen, S.G. (ed.), Frontiers of creativity research: Beyond the basics. Bearly Limited Buffalo, NY pp. 417–27. Sternberg, R.J. (1985) Beyond lQ. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sternberg, R.J. (1988) The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge University Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. (1998) Handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sternberg, R.J. (2000) Handbook of intelligence. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sternberg, R.J. (2001) What is the common thread of creativity? American Psychologist, 56, 160–62. Sternberg, R.J. and Lubart, T. (1995) Defying the crowd: Cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity. Free Press, New York. Unsworth, K. (2001) Unpacking creativity. Academy of Management Review, 26, 289–97. Voss, J.F. and Means, M.L. (1989) Toward a model of creativity based upon problem solving in the social sciences. In Glover, J.A., Ronning, R.R. and Reynolds, C.R. (eds.), Handbook of creativity. Plenum, New York pp. 380–410. Wallach, M.A. and Wing, C.W., Jr. (1969) The talented student: A validation of the creativity-intelligence distinction. Bolt, Rinehart & Winston, New York. Weisberg, R.W. (1988) Problem solving and creativity. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), The nature of creativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp. 148– 76. Weisberg, R.W. (1993) Creativity: Beyond the genius. W.H. Freeman, New York. Weisberg, R.W. (1999) Creativity and knowledge: A challenge to theories. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge pp. 226–50. Welsch, G.S. (1973) Perspectives in the study of creativity. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 7, 231–46.
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Geir Kaufmann is Professor of Psychology at the Norwegian School of Economics and Business Adminsitration. His major research intererests are in the field of managerial and organizational cognition, with a particular emphasis on creativity in a business context. Currently he is engaged in developing and testing a model of the effects of mood on creative problem solving in organizational behaviour.
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USACAIMCreativity and Innovation Management0963-1690Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.September 2004133166175ARTICLESMANAGING FLEXIBILITY AND INNOVATIONCREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
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How Flexibility Facilitates Innovation and Ways to Manage it in Organizations Asta S. Georgsdottir and Isaac Getz Flexibility is the capacity to change and to adapt to a challenging environment. It can be either adaptive – when challenges are present in the environment – or spontaneous – a preference for change without any external pressure. Change and adaptation are also key elements of innovation. In this article, we examine how different types of flexibility can play a major part in the innovation process. First, we discuss how flexible cognition and a flexible personality can facilitate the generation of innovations. Second, we discuss how flexibility can be beneficial to the audience for innovations. Lastly, we use the previous discussion of the benefits of flexibility for innovation to illuminate and present some approaches to the improvement of flexibility – both of employees and of the audience – for innovation. These approaches come both from other researchers’ work and from our own original research on the best practices of innovation management in Europe.
ave you ever wondered how some people are capable of facing challenging new problems, and even of converting them into opportunities? How could Bill Gates drop out from Harvard University in order to build a then ridiculous company named Microsoft? Organizations, just as individuals, need a capacity to adapt to challenges in the marketplace in order to survive and prosper – they need to be flexible. Flexibility is the ability to change. It can appear either under the pressure to adapt to a challenging environment – adaptive flexibility – or it can appear as a spontaneous preference for change for intrinsic reasons – spontaneous flexibility (Thurston & Runco, 1999). At the individual level, flexibility may vary from one person to another. Some individuals will be able to change and to adapt to even the most difficult circumstances, whereas others will not. This is true for organizations as well. Some organizations are slow to react to a challenging environment, whereas others are able to do so more easily. One way individuals and organizations can adapt is by innovating. Innovation concerns ‘behavioral and social processes whereby individuals, groups or organizations seek to achieve desired changes or to avoid the penal-
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ties of inaction’ (West & Richards, 1999, p. 45). It involves generation, acceptance and implementation of new ideas into novel and useful processes, products or services (Kanter, 1983). As such, innovation is overlapping with creativity – the ability to produce novel and appropriate solutions to problems (Amabile, 1996; Lubart, 1994). Depending on the area with which researchers identify themselves, such as psychology or management, they will use either the term ‘creativity’ or ‘innovation’ and focus either on the aspect of idea generation or on the implementation aspect respectively. As this article tries to bridge two fields using psychological research (which prefers ‘creativity’) to illuminate management approaches (preferring ‘innovation’), we use both terms interchangingly. We start with a review of psychological research on flexibility as a characteristic of the innovator, that is, how flexible thinking and flexible personality can lead to generation of new ideas and the creation of new productions. Although we most often refer to the innovator as a single person, the discussed findings also apply to a small team of innovators, and under some circumstances, to a larger innovating unit. Then, we present psychological findings on flexibility as a charac© Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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teristic of the audience for innovations. Here we discuss the ways in which audiences – individuals or groups of persons embedded in cultural contexts – differ in their readiness to accept new ideas and productions. Lastly, we use the previous discussion of the benefits of flexibility for innovation to illuminate and present some approaches to improve flexibility. These approaches come both from other researchers work and from our own research on the best practices of innovation management in Europe.
Flexibility as a Characteristic of the Innovator Cognitive Aspects Flexibility is widely regarded as an essential cognitive ability for innovation (Chi, 1997; Jau sˇovec, 1991, 1994; Runco & Okuda, 1991; Thurston & Runco, 1999; Torrance, 1976; West & Richards, 1999). Research on cognitive flexibility distinguishes adaptive flexibility and spontaneous flexibility, each facilitating innovation in a different way. Adaptive Flexibility Adaptive flexibility is the ability to adopt new strategies to solve a problem when old methods have led to an impasse, or to redefine the problem in order to find an original solution (Thurston & Runco, 1999). A number of authors have drawn attention to how adaptive flexibility in response to environmental constraints can lead to creative outcomes. For Barron (1988), the ability to see problems in new ways is important to find creative solutions and, according to Runco (1999), shifting perspective on a problem facilitates creative insights. For example, Bill Gates was not the first person bored in the university (and even Harvard can bore some). But he was among very few who, instead of dealing with the boredom-in-the-university problem and looking for a fun solution (in fact, he spent quite a lot of time playing cards in his dorm), redefined it as the boredom-in-life problem. Once he did so, many innovative solutions appeared to him. At the organizational level, Lipshitz and Waingortin (1995) provide the following example of adaptive flexibility for innovation. A hotel manager was receiving frequent complaints about the hotel’s lifts being too slow. Before replacing the elevators with a faster model (a very expensive option) he decided to get a psychologist’s point of view on the problem. The psychologist saw the problem not originating in the speed of the
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lifts, but rather in the boredom caused by the wait. He then suggested installing large mirrors in front of the lifts, so that people could pass the time and entertain themselves looking in the mirrors. The manager opted for this (much cheaper) solution, and had no more complaints about lifts being too slow. Thus, taking a different perspective on the problem led to an innovative, low-cost solution. Adaptive flexibility can be measured. Psychologists have designed tasks, used in research, to identify the ability to see ordinary things in the environment from a different point of view, and make connections between elements belonging to distant domains. For example, the candle task (Duncker, 1945), requires the participant to fix a candle on a wall without the wax dropping on the floor using only a candle, a box of matches and a few tacks. Many people cannot find the solution to this problem because they try to attach the candle itself on the wall and consider the box only as a recipient that holds the matches provided. Once they change their perspective, and see the box as a support rather than a container, it becomes apparent that fixing the box on the wall with a few tacks and putting the candle in it solves the problem perfectly. In this way, flexibility in one’s conception of a common object (in this case a box of matches) leads to an original solution, whereas inflexibility (‘functional fixedness’) keeps people stuck. Another measure is the repeated categorization task, which requires a person to devise as many ways as possible to categorize the same series of items (such as words), and thus to find different types of links between the items. As we have shown on our recent work (Georgsdottir & Lubart, 2003), the greater the number of different categorizations of the material, the more the person is considered flexible. We will now consider another aspect of cognitive flexibility, a spontaneous preference for diversity. Spontaneous Flexibility Spontaneous flexibility is the ability to find diverse solutions to a problem when there is no external pressure to be flexible (Thurston & Runco, 1999). The tendency to change conceptual categories easily, and to produce many different types of responses indicates spontaneous flexibility. Bill Gates for example, is known to load his bag with PhD dissertations ranging from molecular biology to nuclear physics every time he leaves for vacations (he is also known to have called vacations a waste of time). There is no pressure on him to expand and change his conceptual categories,
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non-withstanding the antitrust problems experienced by Microsoft: he just spontaneously does it. Spontaneous flexibility can be measured. In some divergent thinking tasks, a person may be requested to find as many ideas as possible concerning the use of a common object. This type of flexibility is integrated in the scoring system of Torrance’s Test of Creative Thinking (Torrance, 1976), one of the most widely used creativity assessment tools based on divergent thinking (Mouchiroud & Lubart, 2001). For example, in one version of the ‘unusual uses’ task, participants are asked to indicate unusual uses for a cardboard box. The (spontaneous) flexibility score corresponds to the number of different conceptual categories from which the responses are drawn. Thus, two individuals, both providing the same number of answers in this task, could vary in their flexibility. An example of a flexible set of answers to the box task would be to make a puppet-theatre, a disguise-outfit and a grocery-store carrier, because each answer can be considered to belong to a different category (respectively, ‘construction’, ‘cardboard clothes’, and ‘box-for-transport’ categories, according to Torrance’s manual). On the contrary, a more rigid set would be observed if the three answers all belonged to the same conceptual category (‘container’ in our example): use the box to carry groceries, to stock empty bottles and to store old books. The Influence of Adaptive and Spontaneous Flexibility on Creativity Several authors have drawn attention to the flexibility of existing knowledge structures as a source of new ideas, and to their rigidity as an obstacle to creativity (Chi, 1997; Mumford, Baughman, Maher, Costanza & Supinski, 1997; Perkins, 1988). Knowledge is structured into conceptual categories – groups of entities such as concepts or images that people believe belong together. The ease by which people can switch between different categories and cross category boundaries can be an indicator of the flexibility of their knowledge structures. Bill Gates, for example, is known to interview his company researchers in every area and to be able to switch easily from one domain to another. According to Perkins (1988), crossing significant conceptual boundaries is an important source of novelty and innovation. For example, Newton crossed paradigm boundaries when going from physics to mathematics, and Einstein did the same when going against the traditional principles of electrodynamics. Operating on or across boundaries demands a change in perspective, as it
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involves questioning the limits of existing knowledge structures. By directly paying attention to boundaries, one can start operating explicitly on these boundaries, fiddling with them to experiment, or intentionally crossing them. In the same vein, Mumford et al. (1997) argue that making flexible use of existing knowledge by combining and re-organizing it plays a key role in generating new ideas. In their study, subjects combined and re-organized items from different unrelated categories in order to generate a new concept that could account for all the items. They found that performance on this category-combination task was positively related to creativity assessed in solving novel and ill-defined problems. Moreover, they found that, when subjects worked with distant categories, instructions to use metaphors to make connections between items led to more new concepts than instructions to use feature mapping (to make connections on the basis of similar concrete features). When working with close categories however, instructions to use feature mapping were more useful. Lastly, for Chi (1997), flexibility of knowledge structure is essential to creativity. For Chi, knowledge is represented on different trees, each holding together associated concepts. This representation of knowledge can be a barrier to creativity for many of us, because it is difficult to move from one tree to another – from one category to another. However, when an individual is able to re-represent a concept from one knowledge tree as a member of another tree, this can result in a creative idea. To take an organizational example, the iMac personal computer illustrates how rerepresenting an object in the context of a totally different knowledge tree – as a design object with aesthetic qualities suitable for home decoration instead of a an informationprocessing tool – can lead to an innovative outcome. This new concept has since widely influenced the design of personal computers now coming in various shapes and colours. In a similar way, using an atypical route for associating one concept to another can result in a creative idea. For example, we have found that using emotional links rather than cognitive ones between concepts increased the likelihood of generating distant metaphors which in turn can be used to produce more creative solutions (Getz & Lubart, 1998). It thus seems that the processes underlying combination and re-organization of knowledge are as important for creativity as the variety of connections that can be made between domains. We have seen how flexibility on the cognitive level can contribute to creativity/innova-
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tion. A number of recent models of creativity however, go beyond the cognitive level and consider how a combination of factors (including personality, cognition, motivation, emotion and/or context) interact to bring about the creation of innovative products (Getz & Lubart, 2000; Getz, Lubart & Biele, 1997; Lubart, Mouchiroud, Tordjman & Zenasni, 2003; Lubart, 1994, 1999; Lubart & Sternberg, 1995; Mumford & Gustafson, 1988). We will now discuss this line of work focusing on how flexibility enhances creativity through the personality and the cognitive style.
Conative Aspects Personality Traits In the psychological research, the personality of highly creative individuals compared to their less-creative counterparts has received a great deal of attention. A number of personality traits (relatively stable, preferred ways of behaving), identified as related to high creative achievement, are also a part of flexible behaviour. When approached as a personality trait, flexibility has traditionally been measured with self-report measures, such as questions pertaining to the individual’s reactions in various situations. According to Gough (1995), flexibility as a personality trait refers to having a preference for change and novelty. This trait has been associated with creative performance in several studies (Dellas & Gaier, 1970; Feist, 1998, 1999; McKinnon, 1962). For example, McKinnon (1962) found creative architects to be more flexible than their less-creative peers. More recently, in a meta-analysis of the research literature on personality and creative achievement, Feist (1998) found creative scientists to be more flexible that less-creative scientists, and artists more flexible than nonartists, as measured by Gough’s (1995) CPIFlexibility scale. Other personality dimensions and traits seem to have flexibility built into them. One example is the ‘Openness to experience’ dimension of the Five-Factor Model of personality (Costa & McCrae, 1985), which has also been associated with creativity. The positive pole of the openness-to-experience trait is anchored with terms such as, ‘flexible’, ‘need for change’, ‘open-minded’ and ‘wide interests’, whereas the negative pole concerns rigidity of beliefs, opinions and behaviours. In Feist’s (1998) meta-analysis, creative scientists, compared to less-creative scientists scored higher on openness to experience. A similar result was observed between groups of artists and non-artists. Furthermore, McCrae (1987)
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reported a positive link between openness to experience and number of ideas generated on divergent thinking tests. Another trait potentially related to spontaneous flexibility is the trait of sensationseeking – a preference for varied and novel sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take risks in order to have such experiences (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000). In general, high sensation seekers tend to be easily bored and actively seek change and varied experiences. Thus, the preference for variety and the spontaneous tendency to seek out new experiences observed for some individuals might be based in their greater than average need for sensory stimulation. Although the trait of sensation-seeking has often been associated with potentially dangerous behaviours (e.g. physically risky activities, experimenting with drugs) it is important to note that new experiences are also pursued through a variety of healthy behaviours, such as sports, travel and arts (Zuckerman, 1983, 1993). Another sign of flexibility on the personality level is the capacity of creative people to integrate apparently conflicting or opposite personality traits. Some authors have suggested that creative people often have a combination of personality traits that seem contradictory, such as sensitivity and coldness (Feist, 1998), or introversion and dominance (Eysenck, 1997). Creative people, it seems, are flexible enough to integrate very dissimilar traits in their personality while still functioning adequately (Eysenck, 1997). For some authors, complexity is even the hallmark of creative people (Barron & Harrington, 1981; Eysenck, 1997). Cognitive Styles Lubart and Sternberg (1995) proposed that certain cognitive styles – preferred ways of using ones cognitive abilities to approach a task – facilitate creativity and innovation. In terms of flexibility, cognitive styles are interesting because some of them involve a particularly flexible approach to problems. For example, progressive stylists (who prefer novelty and welcome changes and innovation) seem to be spontaneously flexible, as opposed to conservative stylists (who prefer the way things have always be done). The same is true regarding more flexible global stylists (who prefer working on a task in its large context) as opposed to local stylists (who prefer focusing on the details): for an efficient global approach, adaptive flexibility seems very important in order to see problems from different perspectives. This would particularly be the case during the problem-finding and problem definition-
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redefinition phases of the creative process, when the problem is still very vague and needs to be clarified. Another stylistic dimension – assimilator versus explorer – often linked to innovation (Martinsen & Kaufman, 1999) essentially describes differences in flexibility when faced with a problem. When put in a problemsolving situation, assimilators are rule bound, following pre-specified algorithms throughout the problem-solving task, whereas explorers will spontaneously vary their solution strategies and search for new solutions. Thus, this cognitive style dimension differentiates between people who spontaneously demonstrate flexibility in problem solving (explorers) and those who approach problems in a more rigid manner (assimilators). Another sign of flexibility could be found in the way different cognitive styles are applied to different situations. While specific cognitive styles have been associated with creativity, shifting between different styles, an expression of flexibility, has received less attention (Martinsen, 1997). For example, the ability to shift between global and local levels of processing could be important for innovation, in order to adapt the style to the different phases of the innovation process such as idea generation or idea implementation. Thus, it may be more profitable to apply a global processing style in the beginning of a task, to identify the need for a new product in the marketplace, or to gather information from a wide range of sources. In contrast, during the more detailed elaboration of a particular product, once its idea has been generated, local processing could be more helpful. Accordingly, the innovation process may be facilitated through the absence of a dominant cognitive style, as a strong style would lead to preferential but sometimes non-optimal behaviours in particular phases of the innovative process. In summary, flexible people – either in cognitive or conative terms – can take advantage of constraints to come up with creative solutions. On a cognitive level, they see problems from a new angle, and can even redefine them into new problems, in order to come up with a more optimal solution. On the personality level, they tend to be complex, open to change, and to have a preference for novelty and strong experiences. In terms of cognitive style, when faced with a problem at work, the flexible employee might have difficulty staying within prescribed rules, but instead want to try out different solutions. In an organization, such individuals might, at first sight, seem hard to canalize, as they have a different perspective on problems, sometimes spend time on subjects that are not directly job related,
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and are easily bored. However, these qualities could be exactly what the organization needs to bring about change. Therefore, the organization has an important role to play to identify, encourage and use the flexibility of their employees. Until now we have discussed how flexibility influences creativity at the idea generation phase of the innovation process. However, no matter how creative the idea is, it will not be implemented if its audience is not ready to accept it. In a mirror effect to innovators’ flexibility, audiences can also vary in their flexibility, thus affecting the innovation process at its idea implementation phase.
Flexibility of the Audience The environmental context of expression has a major influence on whether a specific behaviour or product will be considered creative. For Csikszentmihalyi (1988), creativity is the result of the interaction between the individual and the cultural (in the wide sense) environment. In this view, evaluation of creativity takes place within a culturally defined domain, in which a particular group of judges represents the audience of a new production and evaluates whether it is original and useful, that is, creative. The concept of flexibility applies to judges too. Indeed, depending on how flexible these judges are, they will be more or less willing to evaluate a new production as creative. In terms of business creativity, one area in which audience flexibility has been studied in relation to creativity is consumer behaviour, namely their readiness to accept new products (Goldsmith & Hofacker, 1991; Goldsmith, d’Hauteville & Leisa, 1998). Here we will examine a less-explored audience – which is more relevant to the paper’s managerial focus – namely, managers within the organization who evaluate ideas and projects for creativity. Once we have examined the research on the relation between this audience’s flexibility and organizational creativity, we will be ready to discuss the concrete implications and approaches that organizations adopt in order to increase the flexibility for innovation both at the level of idea generation by individual authors and at the level of idea evaluation by managers. Flexibility has been discussed as one characteristic of the corporate culture – a set of basic values and work practices shared by people working together (Getz & Robinson, 2003a; Schein, 1990) – that explain its influence on creativity. For example, Hisrich (1990) discusses flexibility in terms of corporate climate, established lines of authority, instructions
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and working hours. When this organizational makeup is rigid and thus corporate flexibility low, company managers favour conservative decisions, avoid risky behaviours and consequently, stifle the processing of creative ideas. On the opposite side, flexible organizations with relatively flat (non-hierarchical) structure, teamwork, sponsors and mentors to facilitate communication and co-operation, facilitate such processing. In a similar vein, in a meta-analysis of organizational innovation, Damanpour (1991) found among other factors that a positive managerial attitude toward change and the existence of special units who focus on elaborating, introducing and influencing change facilitates innovation, and is especially useful during the implementation stage, when conflict resolution and co-ordination of efforts are essential. Furthermore, the willingness of managers to change their ways of doing things and to take risk is important for their readiness to help translate new ideas proposed to them into concrete business results (Amabile, 1988). After having discussed the relation between the flexibility and innovation, the question is how flexibility can be improved. We turn to it now, considering first the flexibility at the level of idea generation by individual authors and then flexibility at the level of idea evaluation by managers.
How to Improve Flexibility for Innovation Improving Employee or Small-team Flexibility Regarding the improvement of flexibility at the level of idea generation by an individual author or a small team, the main and complementary approaches are: altering the work organization, changing a person’s rigid attitudes and developing a person’s flexibility. In terms of altering work organization for flexibility, teamwork has been shown as a way to increase flexibility. By relaxing the boundaries between specialized individuals and having them work together, organizations can turn a group of rather rigid persons into a flexible team. This, in turn, constitutes an opportunity to explore a problem from many viewpoints, and may lead to a redefinition of the problem or to novel solutions. For example, Intel encourages its engineers to work in teams to see problems and ideas from different perspectives (Fernald, 1989). Such work organization increases the team’s cognitive flexibility, which potentially facilitates innovation. Another type of work organization improving flexibility consists of distributing the responsi-
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bility for dealing with problems and for seeking solutions for them throughout the organization. Getz and Robinson (2003b) found that companies with such a high level of internal flexibility are often the most innovative. This is not surprising because creativity that depends solely on exceptional people within an organization may not be the best way to manage innovation (Getz & Robinson, 2003a; Hammer, 2001). In companies with flexible, distributed approach to innovation, virtually everyone is able to adopt the role of innovator. In terms of changing people’s rigid attitudes, studies have shown how organizational actors who received training in the use of different modes of thinking (alternatively using divergent and convergent thinking) became more flexible and, also, held more positive attitudes towards creative ideas (Basadur & Hausdorf, 1996). The attitudes, however, can also be changed in an indirect way. Instead of trying to promote a more flexible way to view things in individuals, an organization may try to promote in them a more flexible way to act, hoping that this will also affect attitudes. For example, in our study of over 40 European companies (Getz & Robinson, 2003b) we have observed and described how encouraging employees to search for small daily problems and giving them autonomy to act on these problems leads them to having a more flexible attitude. Instead of saying ‘it’s hopeless to raise this problem in this company’ or ‘this cannot be done here’ they think ‘it’s my problem and I can try to solve it’, thus recognizing the problem as theirs. Because problem recognition and identification is the preliminary phase of any creative process, this more flexible attitude opens up the way for the search of creative solutions. In terms of the development of flexibility in individuals and small teams, we have mentioned several lines of research offering instruments to measure an individual’s conative/ cognitive aspects of flexibility. Organizations using such instruments can find out that individuals from whom they are expecting innovation are: (1) highly flexible, in which case there is nothing to do; (2) moderately flexible, in which case the organization may consider ways to change their attitudes as mentioned above; and (3) inflexible, in which case the organization may look inside or outside to recruit more flexible individuals. In this last case, the same instruments that helped to identify the inflexible individuals may serve to recruit the flexible ones. Thus, organizations can take specific actions to improve employee flexibility and consequently enhance the generation of creative
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ideas and productions at the level of individuals and small teams.
Improving Audience Flexibility Regarding improvement of flexibility at the level of idea evaluation by a managerial audience, the main and complementary approaches are: altering the organization structure, changing the rigid attitudes and development. In terms of altering organization structure for flexibility, Rosenfeld and Servo (1991) discuss how de-personalization and decreased communication found in many large organizations makes them more rigid. This in turn leads to the low flexibility of the audience for creativity, composed of three types of actors: experts on technology who evaluate the technical aspects of the new idea; champions who may provide or not their political support to the innovator within the organization; and sponsors – senior or higher-status members of the organization – who may provide material and/or human resources necessary to implement the new idea. All three types need to be working together in order to evaluate, and then enable the implementation of the idea. Rosenfeld and Servo (1991) also suggested the ways to make the organization structure less rigid, thus enhancing the flexibility in this multi-actor audience. For example, these authors found that creating specific interdepartmental ‘offices of innovation’ increases audience flexibility. This structure, operating independently from other departments, receives input from them in terms of new ideas and then searches for and brings together the appropriate experts, sponsors and champions from all departments of the organization who constitute an audience for these ideas. Thus, a change in organizational structure through the introduction of an interdepartmental office brings a lot of flexibility in the composition and assembly of audiences for ideas. This flexibility increases the likelihood of ideas being properly evaluated and then, if approved, implemented. In terms of changing an audience’s rigid attitudes, training for flexibility has been shown as one way to improve it. Basadur and Hausdorf (1996), in the already mentioned study, showed that managers’ attitudes changed by having them experience different modes of thinking. This leads managers to more flexibility, and as a result, greater willingness to encourage and accept creativity in their collaborators. In terms of development of flexibility in the audience, organizations can go further than simply altering organizational structure or
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changing managers’ attitudes. In our already mentioned study of several dozen European companies (Getz & Robinson, 2003b), we have described how a System for Managing Ideas (SMI) allows every employee to produce, implement and be recognized for his or her ideas. A key to this system is a particularly flexible role played by the managers as the audience for ideas. Instead of a rigid role typically played in many companies when a manager facing a subordinate with an idea is indifferent or feels threatened (considering, for example, that it is a managerial prerogative to have ideas or that subordinate questions methods of work the manger is in charge of maintaining), in companies with SMI, the role played by managers is totally different. They consider their job to be one of supporting, facilitating and coaching their subordinates in all their activities, thus becoming an ideal audience for ideas. This directly leads to the increased innovation. In a typical process, when a subordinate comes up with an idea, a manager will first thank the subordinate for raising the problem and making the efforts to solve it. Then, if the solution looks good, the manager will let the subordinate to implement it as soon as possible (providing the resources if necessary). If the solution is not good (a fairly rare case, because the subordinate typically tests and spends time on the solution before going to see the manager) the manager arranges for the subordinate to have more time, or expert assistance to improve the solution. Lastly, it may happen that the direct managers cannot evaluate the solution either because of the large amount of resources required or the extensive implications on other parts of the company. In such cases, managers transfer their audience role to their own direct manager and so on. At each level, managers react in the same way, trying always to evaluate the solution and authorize its implementation if they have the necessary resources and expertise. In addition to providing an ideal audience for creative ideas, this flexible management of subordinate initiatives has a profound impact on the innovators themselves. Indeed, by encouraging and welcoming everyone to come up with ideas, the organization sends through its managers a message that every employee is potentially creative in his or her own way. The organization conveys the message that a lack of individual creativity is not due to a deficit in the necessary personal traits and abilities, but to the company’s failure to deploy proper work and managerial practices to fully use its employees’ creative potential. Compared to the earlier-mentioned approaches, the SMI constitutes a profound
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change in perspective on the employee creativity in an organizational context. In the former, sometimes called elitist approaches, creativity was seen as a rare attribute of exceptional individuals that the organization needs to find and nurture. According to the SMI, all employees are seen as having a creative potential that the organization needs to encourage and use in order to innovate on a larger and more profound scale. Indeed, in organizations having good SMI, front-line, ordinary employees initiate 80% of all innovations, and on the average these innovations are judged as more breakthrough than those initiated by people in R&D, marketing and other ‘elitist’ organizational units. To summarize, the set of SMI practices installs an extremely high organizational flexibility first, at the level of the audience for ideas and then, at the level of innovators themselves. Instead of having a few people dealing with innovation in a few places, everyone, whatever his or her job and position, is producing ideas that are promptly evaluated and implemented. Furthermore, instead of people innovating only in specific, predefined areas, innovation is occurring in every usefulfor-a-company domain.
Conclusion In this article we have presented several ways in which flexibility can facilitate innovation. Flexibility allows the innovator to get out of impasses when solving problems, to see problems from a perspective that no one noticed before and even to identify new problems to solve. Additionally, the audience for ideas needs flexibility in order to be receptive, to give new and unusual ideas a chance so that they can see the light and demonstrate their value and to give everyone a chance to generate and implement an idea. In terms of improving flexibility, there are several approaches that organizations can adopt and which, in turn, may stimulate innovation. On the level of the individual innovator, flexibility for innovation can be improved by altering the work organization, changing a person’s rigid attitudes and developing a person’s flexibility. On the level of audience for ideas, flexibility for innovation can be improved through altering the organizational structure, changing managers’ rigid attitudes and developing flexibility in management. In particular, the SMI dramatically increases organizational flexibility for corporate innovation, as it brings together different flexible work and management practices and provides a new perspective on organizational innovation.
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In today’s environment, the only certainty is change. New competitors, whole new countries and consumers are modifying entire industries on an unprecedented scale. To prosper, to use this turbulence as an opportunity and not as a threat, organizations need the capacity to adapt quickly to new conditions. Flexibility is an important dimension of this capacity, both for individual employees and for the organization, because it allows a higher level of innovation, thus reducing their vulnerability and increasing their chances to grow and prosper.
Acknowledgement The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for many valuable comments.
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Feist, G.J. (1998) A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2, 290–309. Feist, G.J. (1999) The influence of personality on artistic and scientific creativity. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 273–96. Fernald, L.W. (1989) A new trend: Creative and innovative corporate environments. Journal of Creative Behavior, 23, 208–13. Getz, I. and Lubart, T.I. (1998) The emotional resonance model of creativity: Theoretical and practical extensions. In Russ, S.W. (ed.), Affect, creative experience, and psychological adjustment. Bruner/ Mazel, Philadelphia, PA, pp. 41–56. Getz, I. and Lubart, T.I. (2000) An emotional-experiential perspective on creative symbolic-metaphorical processes. Consciousness and Emotion, 1, 89–118. Getz, I., Lubart, T.I. and Biele, G. (1997) L’apprentissage du changement dans l’organisation: la perspective de la créativité. [The acquisition of change in the organization: The perspective of creativity]. In Besson, P. (ed.), Dedans – dehors: Les nouvelles frontières de l’organization [Inside – outside: The organizations’ new frontiers] Vuibert, Paris, pp. 205–17. Getz, I. and Robinson, A.G. (2003a) Innovate or die: Is that a fact? Creativity and Innovation Management, 12, 130–36. Getz, I. and Robinson, A.G. (2003b) Vos idées changent tout! Le secret de la réussite durable [Your ideas change everything: The secret of lasting success]. Paris: Editions d’Organisation (german revised edition: Innovations Power: Kreative Mitarbeiter fördern – Ideen systematisch generieren, München: Hanser, 2003). Georgsdottir, A.G. and Lubart, T.I. (2003) La flexibilité cognitive et la créativité: une approche développementale, différentielle et expérimentale [Cognitive flexibility and creativity: a developmental, differential and experimental approach]. Psychologie Française, 48, 29–40. Goldsmith, R.E., d’Hauteville, F. and Leisa, R. (1998) Theory and measurement of consumer innovativeness: A transactional evaluation. European Journal of Marketing, 32, 340–53. Goldsmith, R.E. and Hofacker, C.F. (1991) Measuring consumer innovativeness. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 19, 209–21. Gough, H.G. (1995) Guide Pratique d’Interprétation du CPI. [Practical guide for interpretation of the CPI]. ECPA, Paris. Hammer, M. (2001) The agenda: What every business must do to dominate the decade. Crown Business, New York, NY. Hisrich, R.D. (1990) Entrepreneurship/Intrapreneurship. American Psychologist, 45, 209–22. Jau sˇovec, N. (1991) Flexible strategy use: A characteristic of gifted problem solving. Creativity Research Journal, 4, 349–66. Jau sˇovec, N. (1994) Flexible thinking: An explanation for individual differences in ability. Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ. Kanter, R.M. (1983) The change masters: Innovations for productivity in the American corporation. Simon & Schuster, New York, NY.
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Lipshitz, R. and Waingortin, M. (1995) Getting out of ruts: A laboratory study of a cognitive model of reframing. Journal of Creative Behavior, 23, 151– 71. Lubart, T.I. (1994) Creativity. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Thinking and problem solving Academic Press, New York, NY pp. 289–332. Lubart, T.I. (1999) Creativity across cultures. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Handbook of creativity. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, pp. 339– 50. Lubart, T.I., Mouchiroud, C., Tordjman, S. and Zenasni, F. (2003) Psychologie de la créativité [Psychology of creativity]. Armand Colin, Paris. Lubart, T.I. and Sternberg, R.J. (1995) An investment approach to creativity: Theory and data. In Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B. et al (eds.), The creative cognition approach. MIT Press Cambridge, MA, pp. 271–302. Martinsen, O. (1997) The construct of cognitive style and its implications for creativity. High Ability Studies, 8, 135–58. Martinsen, O. and Kaufman, G. (1999) Cognitive style and creativity. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S.R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity, Vol. 1. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 273–82. McCrae, R.R. (1987) Creativity, divergent thinking, and openness to experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1258–65. McKinnon, D.W. (1962) The nature and nurture of creative talent. American Psychologist, 17, 484–95. Mouchiroud, C. and Lubart, T.I. (2001) Children’s original thinking: An empirical examination of alternative measures derived from divergent thinking tasks. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 162, 382–401. Mumford, M.D. and Gustafson, S.B. (1988) Creativity syndrome: Integration, application and innovation. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 27–43. Mumford, M.D., Baughman, W.A., Maher, M.A., Constanza, D.P. and Supinski, E.P. (1997) Processbased measures of creative problem-solving skills: IV. Category combination. Creativity Research Journal, 10, 59–71. Perkins, D.N. (1988) The possibility of invention. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), The nature of creativity: Contemporary psychological perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 362–85. Rosenfeld, R. and Servo, J.C. (1991) Facilitating innovation in large organizations. In Henry, J. and Walker, D. (eds.), Managing innovation. Sage Publications, London, pp. 28–39. Runco, M.A. (1999) Perspectives. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S.R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity, Vol. 2. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 373– 76. Runco, M.A. and Okuda, S.M. (1991) The instructional enhancement of the flexibility and originality scores of divergent thinking tests. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 5, 435–41. Schein, E.H. (1990) Organizational culture. American Psychologist, 45, 109–19. Thurston, B.J. and Runco, M.A. (1999) Flexibility. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S.R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity, Vol. 1. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 729–32. Torrance, E.P. (1976) Tests de pensée créative. [Tests of creative thinking]. ECPA, Paris.
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West, M.A. and Richards, T. (1999) Innovation. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S.R. (eds.), Encyclopedia of creativity, Vol. 2. Academic Press, San Diego, CA, pp. 45–55. Zuckerman, M. (1983) Sensation seeking and sports. Personality and Individual Differences, 4, 285–92. Zuckerman, M. (1993) Sensation seeking and reactions to nature paintings. Personality and Individual Differences, 15, 563–76. Zuckerman, M. and Kuhlman, D.M. (2000) Personality and risk-taking: Common biosocial factors. Journal of Personality, 68, 999–1029.
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Asta S. Georgsdottir is currently completing her doctoral studies at the University of René Descartes-Paris 5, Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, 71 av. Edouard Vaillant, 92100 Boulogne-Billancourt, France. E-mail:
[email protected]. She received her BA degree in Psychology from the University of Iceland, Reykjavik, and her DEA (masters) degree from the University of René Descartes. Her research focuses on cognitive flexibility, with an emphasis on individual differences, and the development of cognitive flexibility in children and adolescents. Isaac Getz is a professor of idea, involvement and innovation management at the ESCP-EAP European School of Management, Paris, France. He was Visiting Professor at Cornell and Stanford Universities and at the University of Massachusetts. Dr Getz’s current research focuses on idea and innovation management, involvement practices and corporate excellency. He has recently edited a book, Organizational Creativity (Vuibert, 2002 in French), and coauthored another book Your ideas change everything (Editions d’Organisation, 2003 in French; revised editions with different titles at Hanser, 2003 in German; Ra-Ma, 2004 in Spanish; Kluwer, 2004 in Dutch).
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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USACAIMCreativity and Innovation Management0963-1690Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004.September 2004133ARTICLESEVOCATION PROCESSES IN DESIGNCREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT
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Evocation Processes by Novice and Expert Designers: Towards Stimulating Analogical Thinking Nathalie Bonnardel and Evelyne Marmèche Design activity occurs in many professions, ranging from technical to more artistic domains. Whatever the domain, it is a constant challenge for designers to introduce creativity in each design project they work on and minimize the tendency to repeat familiar design features. The goal of this paper is to present a cognitive approach to design problem solving as well as an experimental study. This study aims at determining whether creative ideas can be enhanced by the presentation of external sources of inspiration. In particular, we analyse the effect of the presentation of different kinds of sources (intra- versus interdomain sources, which are presented as graphical representations or as verbal labels) according to the designers’ level of expertise (lay-designers versus professionals). Results show that it is possible to enhance evocation processes in design, but that it is dependent on both the nature of sources of inspiration and the designers’ level of expertise. Based on these results, we suggest ways for enhancing creative ideas in design tasks.
Introduction esign activities are performed in a very large range of professional areas, such as the design of everyday life products (e.g. Norman, 1993), website design (e.g. Bonnardel, Lanzone & Sumner, 2003), software design (Détienne, 2001) or even the design of aerospace products (Bonnardel, 1999). Whatever the design area, the final products have both to be useful, usable and attractive for customers or users. The usefulness depends on the functionality planned for the products at hand, which should be in accordance with users’ needs. In order to create usable (or easy to use) products, designers can refer to guidelines and ergonomic principles or criteria (see, for instance, Norman, 1993; Nielsen, 1993, 2000; Scapin & Bastien, 1997). Though applying guidelines or ergonomic criteria appears not to be easy (Bonnardel & Chevalier, 2001; Chevalier & Ivory, 2003), designers can attend human-computer classes and training in order to reach more usable products. Developing attractive products is also a major challenge, since the decision of purchase frequently depends on the users’ first feelings about the considered product.
D
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So the first main question is: how to stimulate the design of such useful, usable and attractive products? Our objective in this paper is to better understand how creative ideas occur in design activities, and whether it is possible to enhance the emergence of such ideas by stimulating analogical thinking. The role of analogy-making in creativity has been stressed by several authors; for instance, Koestler (1975), Kolodner (1993) and Boden (1990). Analogical thinking is also considered as having a positive role in creative design activities or in ‘cognitive generative tasks’ (see Bonnardel, 2000; Ward, Smith & Vaid, 1997). Koestler (1975, p. 121) explained creativity as ‘the sudden interlocking of two previously unrelated skills, or matrices of thought’. According to Ward, Smith and Vaid (1997), people engaged in generative cognitive activities have to extend the boundaries of a conceptual domain by mentally crafting novel instances of the concept. This paper first presents a cognitive approach that characterizes design problemsolving and describes cognitive mechanisms involved in creative design activities. Next, an experimental study is described. It aims both at determining whether it is possible to define © Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
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experimental conditions that enhance evocation processes in design and whether such conditions are dependent on the designers’ level of expertise. Lastly, based on the obtained results, we suggest ways for enhancing evocation processes in designers’ thinking.
Creativity in Design: A Cognitive Psychology View Design Problem Solving In cognitive psychology, design activities are described as problem-solving situations: designers have to produce an artefact, which should fit a specific function and satisfy different requirements (Malhotra et al., 1980). These requirements define to some extent the goal to reach, but designers have to complement their mental representation of the design problem, since these problems are ill-structured or ill-defined (Eastman, 1969; Reitman, 1964; Simon, 1973). Indeed, at the beginning of the problem, the designers have only an incomplete and imprecise mental representation of the design goal. It is only through the problem-solving process itself that designers can complete their mental representations by choosing design options (see Falzon et al. 1990). Thus, the design problem solving results from a co-evolution of problem and solution spaces (Cross & Dorst, 1999; Dorst & Cross, 2001). This specificity of design problems has also been described as based on an iterative dialectic between problem framing and problem solving (Rittel & Webber, 1984; Simon, 1995). During problem framing, designers refine design goals and specifications and, thus, refine their mental representation of the problem. During problem solving, designers elaborate solutions and evaluate these solutions with respect to various criteria and constraints, which guide the designers in performing subsequent stages of design problem solving (see, for instance, Bonnardel, 1993, 1999). Continuous interactions between the problem space and the solution space allows a reflective conversation between the designer and his/her external representation of the artefact (see Schön, 1983). Each designer constructs his or her own mental representation of the design problem and deals in fact with a problem which has become specific to him or her. Different designers dealing with a same problem, develop different ideas and reach different solutions, materialized, for instance, by drawings or plans (Bisseret, Figeac-Létang & Falzon, 1988).
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Design problems are also considered to be open-ended since there is usually no single correct solution for a given problem, but instead a variety of potential solutions (Fustier, 1989), which satisfy different criteria or constraints to varying degrees.
Opportunistic Process The dialectic process between problem framing and problem solving contributes to another characteristic of design problem solving: it is viewed as an opportunistic process. Several years ago, much debate centred on whether design activities were hierarchically organized (see, for instance, Adelson & Soloway, 1985; Jeffries et al., 1981) or opportunistically organized (for a review, see Visser, 1994). The seminal study of Hayes-Roth and Hayes-Roth (1979) and later research (see, for instance, Bisseret, Figeac-Létang & Falzon, 1988; Guindon, 1990; Visser, 1990) provided arguments on behalf of an opportunistic organization of design activities, though they possibly include hierarchical episodes. The design process was thus described as multidirectional: decisions included both top-down and bottom-up instances and they could be made at different levels of abstraction etc. Such an activity was characterized by the authors as opportunistic because ‘each decision [was] motivated by one or two immediately preceding decisions, rather than by some high-level executive program’ (Hayes-Roth & Hayes-Roth, 1979, p. 381). Such decisions could lead to reconsidering previous decisions or postponing certain decisions (Bonnardel, Lanzone & Sumner, 2003; Hayes-Roth & Hayes-Roth, 1979; Visser, 1990).
Emergence of New Ideas Understanding how designers opportuniscally develop new ideas and reach innovative products remains a major issue. Models of creativity have been proposed in order to highlight the sociocultural context in which individual creativity occurs (see Boden, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Fischer, 2000; Liu, 2000). Other approaches describe characteristics of creative individuals (e.g. motivation, attitude, knowledge, skills) in relationship with positive or negative effects of the environment (Amabile, 1996). In particular, the ‘investment approach’ (Sternberg & Lubart, 1991, 1995) points out necessary resources for creative persons (e.g. intelligence, knowledge, motivation and so on) as well as the necessity
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of presenting the new production at the right moment for the production to be appreciated. Since our objective is to understand more precisely how the designers’ mental representations evolve in order to reach an innovative production, we are going to focus on cognitive processes developed by designers, in line with cognitive-components approaches of creativity (see Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Mumford et al., 1991; Runco & Chand, 1995). Based both on observations in professional design situations (Bonnardel, 1992; Dorst, 1997; Valkenburg & Dorst, 1998) and previous experiments involving real design problemsolving activities (Bonnardel, 2000), we argue that evocation process in design is based on two main cognitive mechanisms which continuously interact: • The construction of a ‘constrained cognitive environment’, which delimits the space of research, on the basis of different kinds of constraints, in order quickly to reach indepth levels of understanding. These constraints can consist of prescribed constraints derived from a schedule of conditions, ‘constructed’ constraints which depend on the designers’ expertise, or ‘deduced’ constraints, which depend on the current state of problem solving as well as on previously defined constraints (see Bonnardel, 1993). Constraints are propagated during design problem solving (Darses, 1994) and they dynamically orient the designer’s reasoning towards the most appropriate decisionmaking and choices of design options (Bonnardel, 1999). • Analogy-making, which can open up or restrict the ‘space of research’ of new ideas, depending on the nature of the sources that are evoked for solving the problem at hand. Design activities would be more or less creative according to the conceptual domains evoked sources belong to, and to the features of sources taken into account, such as functional, aesthetic or structural features (see Bonnardel & Marmèche, 2003).
Analogy Making and Expertise A lot of results showed that the cognitive treatment of data is performed differently depending on the participants’ level of expertise (see, for instance, Bonnardel & Marmèche, 2003; Besnard & Bastien-Toniazzo, 1999; Chi, Feltovitch & Glaser, 1981; Didierjean & Marmèche, 2003). Case-based reasoning is a usual cognitive process for experts, since they have a large library of cases at their disposal. Experts can refer to such cases in order to engage in analogy-making for solving
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design problems. Analogy-making is, however, double-edged: • on one hand, it allows experts to consider promising ways for designing a new object; • on another hand, it can restrict the boundaries of the space of research, the extent of design ideas, the range of procedures to be used and thus, reduce creativity. In contrast, novice designers have only a few reference cases to deal with new design problems, which may restrict their space of research of innovative ideas. Analogy-making is usually described as allowing two kinds of analogies: • intradomain analogies, when the target (e.g. the situation or problem at hand) and the source (a previous similar situation) belong to the same conceptual domain; • interdomain analogies, when the target and the source belong to different conceptual domains. In addition, relationships are established between the target and the source. Intradomain analogies would be based on both surface similarities and structural similarities between the target and the cible, whereas interdomain analogies would be based only on structural similarities (or underlying principles) between the target and the sources. A way to influence people in developing ideas is to provide them with suggestions or examples. Thus, several experiments were conducted, in the case of ‘cognitive generative tasks’, in order to determine the impact of the presentation of examples on participants’ productions. Experimental tasks were defined in various areas: to design technical artefacts, such as spill-proof mugs or bicycle racks (Jansson & Smith, 1989, 1991; Purcell & Gero, 1992), to design novel space creatures to inhabit a distant planet, to provide novel ideas for reducing traffic accidents (Marsh, Landau & Hicks, 1996; Smith, Ward, & Schumacher, 1993; Ward, 1994; Ward & Sifonis, 1997). Whatever the final objective, mainly similar results were observed: when they are provided with examples, participants’ productions conform to experimenter-provided examples. Such an effect has been called ‘design fixation effect’ in the case of design activities (Jansson & Smith, 1989, 1991). This type of effect appears, to a certain extent, similar to phenomena described for years, in psychology, under the terms of ‘functional fixedness’ and ‘mechanisation of thought’ (see Duncker, 1945; Luchins, 1942; Maier, 1931, Weisberg, 1988). In contrast to these results, we argue that it is possible to enhance the evocation of new ideas and, especially, to lead designers to
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extend their space of research, by providing them with different kinds of sources of inspiration. The objectives of our study are to determine: • What is the nature of the sources of inspiration spontaneously evoked by lay designers and professionals. • Whether it is possible to support designers in extending the boundaries of the conceptual domain related to the object to be designed, by providing them with different kinds of sources. • Whether designers’ evocation processes are different according to their level of expertise.
Experimental Study Hypotheses • Throughout the design activity, professional designers should globally evoke more intra- and interdomain sources than lay designers, since they are used to make analogies in their professional activities. • In line with previous research about the design fixation effect, we expected that designers, whatever their level of expertise, would evoke mainly intra-domain sources directly related to the object to be designed. • However, we hypothesized that professional designers may extend their space of research of ideas, when they are provided with interdomain sources. The suggestion of interdomain sources could lead professionals to develop a reflection based on principles underlying these interdomain sources, and to adopt various points of view, which lead them to evoke new creative ideas. In contrast, we hypothesized that lay designers will be more focused on surface features of the object to be designed. Therefore, they would not realize the potential interest of interdomain sources, which
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are apparently far from the object to be designed. In addition, we compared two formats of presentation of the suggested sources: graphical representations versus verbal labels. In previous research, examples were always presented as graphical representations, which could limit the space of research more than verbal labels.
Participants 75 designers participated in this study: • 25 professionals, who have been working in design offices for at least three years. They were between 26 and 66 years old and they had superior degrees in industrial design, graphical or applied arts, architecture. With regard to these characteristics, participants were assigned to each of the five experimental groups, in order to have matched groups. • 50 ‘lay designers’, who were students in their first or second year of Psychology, and who had no experience at all in industrial design.
Experimental Task All the participants had to perform the same task: to design a new seat (see Figure 1). This task was defined in collaboration with a professor of industrial design and presented to participants as a scenario describing the object to design and its use, as well as the main requirements to satisfy. The object they had to design belongs to a category of objects wellknown by everyone, novice or expert, since it is a specific seat. Participants had to express ideas and evoke sources, and though they realized drawings, our analysis is not focused on the quality of the drawings (which would require more technical skills), nor on their role
The object to be designed was intended to be used in a Parisian ‘cyber-café’. It should be a particular seat with a contemporary design in order to be attractive for young customers. Such seats should allow the user to have a good sitting position, holding the back upright. Towards this end, the users should put their knees on a support intended to this function. In addition, these seats should allow the users the opportunity to relax, by offering them the possibility of rocking.
Figure 1. Brief Description of the Object to Design
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in the design task. Data analyses are only focused on the evoked sources, either without any suggested source of inspiration, or after the presentation of some sources, intra- or interdomain.
Three judges independently categorized these sources as being intra- or interdomain sources. A high degree of agreement was obtained (0.95). In case of hesitation, a short discussion allowed us to reach a complete agreement.
Experimental Conditions and Procedure The participants had to solve the design problem in their own office. They were assigned to groups corresponding to the following experimental conditions: • A ‘free’ condition, in which the participants were only provided with the description of the design problem. • Four ‘guided’ conditions in which the participants were first provided with the description of the design problem and, immediately after, with two potential sources of inspiration. These sources were either intra-domain or interdomain sources, and presented in a verbal or in a graphical format (see Figure 2). The suggested intra-domain sources pertain to the ‘seat’ category, which is the category the object to be designed belongs to. They consist of a rocking chair and an office chair. The suggested interdomain sources do not belong to the category of the object to be designed. They consist of a climbing position and a logo. Each participant had about 50 minutes to begin to solve the design problem at hand. The designers’ drawings were video-recorded in order to allow us to analyse their evolution. In addition, in order to allow us to identify the sources of inspiration they referred to, the participants were invited to think aloud (see Dorst & Cross, 2001; Ericsson & Simon, 1993; Gero & Mc Neil, 1998; Piolat & Pélissier, 1998). The designers’ verbalizations were transcribed in order to perform an analysis of new evoked sources.
Data Analysis Since we focused on the designers’ evocation processes, two indicators related to these processes were taken into account: • the number of new sources evoked by the designers all along the design activity; • the nature of new evoked sources, by distinguishing intra-domain sources and interdomain sources. By ‘new’ sources of inspiration, we mean that, for the four guided conditions, the account was performed on sources of inspiration that were not the suggested ones, but really newly evoked sources (for instance, a camping seat, a sledge, a wave or a nest).
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Results Number and Nature of Sources Evoked by Lay Designers and Professionals in the Free and Guided Conditions A first ANOVA was conducted on the number of evoked sources, with the ‘expertise level’ (lay designers versus professionals) and the ‘kind of condition’ (free condition versus guided conditions) as between-subject factors. The results yielded a significant effect of the expertise level F(1,71) = 10,33; MSe = 14,32; p < 0.01. The effect of the conditions was nonsignificant. The results indicated no significant interaction between expertise level and kind of conditions. A second ANOVA was conducted on the ‘nature of the evoked sources’ (intra- versus interdomain sources), with the ‘expertise level’ (lay designers versus professionals) and the ‘kind of condition’ (free condition versus guided conditions) as between-subject factors. The results indicated three significant interactions: the interaction between expertise level and the nature of the evoked sources, F(1,71) = 5,96; MSe = 5,71; p < 0.05, the interaction between the kind of conditions and the nature of the evoked sources, F(1,71) = 4,22; MSe = 5,71; p < 0.05, and the triple interaction between expertise level, kind of conditions and nature of the evoked sources, F(1,71) = 4,63; MSe = 5,71; p < 0.05. In accordance with our first hypothesis, lay designers evoked less sources than professionals: in mean, respectively, 2.9 versus 6.4 (see Table 1). Thus, with the acquisition of expertise, the space of research is extended. In line with our second hypothesis, whatever their level of expertise, designers spontaneously evoked (i.e. in the free condition) more intra-domain sources than interdomain sources (see Table 1). The effect of the ‘condition’ factor (i.e. free versus guided conditions) is not globally significant: there is no significant difference in the number of sources evoked in the ‘free’ condition versus in the different ‘guided’ conditions taken together. However, planned comparisons show that though there is no significant effect for lay designers, for professionals, a significant interaction between conditions and the number of evoked sources does exist (intra- and interdomain sources). In the free
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Nature of sources
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Intradomain
Interdomain
Format of presentation
Graphical representations
OFFICE CHAIR
CLIMBING POSITION
Verbal labels
ROCKING-CHAIR
LOGO
Figure 2. Suggested Sources of Inspiration
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Table 1. Number and Nature of Sources Evoked by Lay Designers and Professionals in the Free and Guided Conditions Experimental conditions
Free condition
Guided conditions
1.8 1.1 2.9 3.4 3.0 6.4
2.0 1.2 3.2 1.6 5.6 7.2
Level of expertise Lay designers
Professionals
Intra Inter Total Intra Inter Total
condition, professionals mainly evoked intradomain sources, whereas it is the reverse in the guided conditions, in which interdomain sources are predominant. Number and Nature of Sources Evoked by Lay Designers and Professionals According to the Kinds of Suggested Sources and their Format of Presentation A first ANOVA was conducted on the number of evoked sources, with the ‘expertise level’ (lay designers versus professionals), the kind of ‘suggested sources’ (intra- versus interdomain sources) and the ‘presentation format’ (graphical representations versus labels) as between-subject factors. The results yielded a significant effect of the expertise level, F(1,52) = 15,52; MSe = 13,40; p < 0.001, a significant effect of the factor ‘suggested sources’ F(1,52) = 9,56; MSe = 13,40; p < 0.01 and a significant interaction between the factors ‘expertise level’ and ‘suggested sources’ F(1,52) = 12,89; MSe = 13,40; p < 0.001. The effect of the presentation format was non-significant, nor any interaction involving this factor. A second ANOVA was conducted on the nature of the evoked sources (intra- versus intedomain), with the ‘expertise level’ (lay designers versus professionals) and the kind of ‘suggested sources’ (intra- versus interdomain sources) as between-subject factors. The results indicated a significant effect of the expertise level, F(1,56) = 16,05; MSe = 6,48; p < 0.001, of the suggested sources, F(1,56) = 9,88; MSe = 6,48; p < 0.01] and of the number of intra versus interdomain sources that are evoked, F(1,56) = 11,75; MSe = 5,63; p < 0.01]. The interaction between expertise level and the kind of the suggested sources is significant, F(1,56) = 13,33; MSe = 6,48; p < 0.001. The interaction between expertise level and the nature of the evoked sources is significant, F(1,56) = 26,71;
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MSe = 5,63; p < 0.001. The interaction between the suggested sources and the evoked sources is also significant, F(1,56) = 12,12; MSe = 5,63; p < 0.001. The triple interaction between expertise level, suggested sources and nature of the evoked sources is not significant. To summarize, for lay designers, the suggestion of sources, whatever they are intra- or interdomain, did not appear to enhance the production of new creative ideas. In contrast, for professionals, the interdomain condition significantly facilitated the evocation of sources (in mean, 10.5 evoked sources), whereas the intra-domain condition appeared to limit the evocation of sources (in mean, 3.8 evoked sources) with regard to the result obtained in the free condition (6.4 evoked sources). In the guided conditions, whatever the nature of suggested sources, professionals evoked more interdomain sources than intra-domain ones (see Table 2). However, the space of research of interdomain sources appears to be even larger for professionals when they are provided with interdomain sources (in mean, 8.3) than with intradomain sources (in mean, 2.8). Thus, expertise seems to be related to the possibility of accessing interdomain sources, a priori far from the object to design. No significant difference due to the format of presentation (graphical representations or verbal labels) of the initially suggested sources was observed, whatever the designers’ level of expertise.
Discussion This study highlights interesting findings: • The evocation of creative sources of inspiration mainly results from analogy-making with interdomain sources.
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Table 2. Number and Nature of Sources Evoked by Lay Designers and Professionals in the Guided Conditions, According to the Nature and Format of Presentation of Suggested Sources Suggested sources
Intra-domain sources
Interdomain sources
Level of expertise
Graphical
Verbal
Graphical
Verbal
3.3 0.2 3.5 0.8 1.6 2.4
2.0 1.4 3.4 1.2 4.0 5.2
1.3 1.4 2.7 2.2 9.2 11.4
1.4 1.8 3.2 2.2 7.4 9.6
Lay-designers
Professionals
Intra Inter Total Intra Inter Total
• It is possible to exert an influence on the designers’ evocation processes, but this influence depends on the designers’ level of expertise. Our results appear very different from previous findings (such as the ones of Jansson & Smith, 1989, 1991): • For lay-designers, the presentation of sources of inspiration – playing the role of examples – did not limit the number of new evoked sources, though it did not expand it. • In contrast, for professionals, we observed a limitation of the evocation of sources when they were provided with intradomain sources. This result is in line with the one obtained by Jansson & Smith (1989, 1991). These authors analysed the effect of intra-domain sources presented as examples to professionals in order to design a bicycle-rack. However, our study showed that an opposite effect is obtained when professionals (but not lay designers) are provided with interdomain sources. In this case, these sources highly facilitated the evocation of new sources. Thus, with regard to the number of evoked sources, the evocation processes of professionals can be more easily facilitated than the ones of lay designers. In addition, professionals appear to be very sensitive to the type of sources they are provided with. Concerning the nature of evoked sources, we found that, in the free condition, both professionals and lay designers spontaneously evoked mainly intra-domain sources. However, we observed that, in contrast to lay designers, professionals can avoid such spontaneous behaviour, when they are provided with external sources, whatever the nature of these sources. Indeed, professionals who were
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provided with sources mainly evoked interdomain sources, whatever the nature (intra- or interdomain) of the suggested sources. The cognitive treatment of the suggested sources seems to be performed differently according to the designers’ level of expertise. Some research showed that experienced designers are able to take into account a multiplicity of aspects of suggested sources (functional, structural, aesthetic and so on), which could allow them to activate in long-term memory very heterogeneous new sources, or conflicting aspects from different domains (see Bonnardel & Marmèche, 2003; Dorst, 1997).
Towards Enhancing Creative Ideas in Design Various techniques and divergent thinking guidelines – such as the classical brainstorming technique (Osborn, 1963) – have been proposed in order to foster creativity (see Dewulf & Baillie, 1999; Nickerson, 1999). In the case of professional situations, such as design, the challenge is to provide designers with a specific support in accordance with their level of expertise. Moreover, it is also necessary to provide designers with a ‘contextualized’ support and to present it ‘at the right moment’, i.e. when designers look for new ideas and progressively define their space of research. Though there is a co-evolution of problem and solution (Cross & Dorst, 1999; Dorst & Cross, 2001) as well as an iterative dialectic between problem framing and problem solving (Rittel & Webber, 1984; Simon, 1995), if suggestions occur too late in the design process, designers may not consider these suggestions, since they will be more focused on graphically representing their own design ideas.
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Towards the end of adapting support to the designers’ level of expertise, our findings show that only experts benefit from the presentation of external sources of inspiration, and especially of interdomain sources. Such sources allow experts to explore new conceptual domains. In contrast, for novices, the fact of being provided with sources, either intra- or interdomain, does not significantly modify the evocation of new sources. Our interpretation is that the suggested intra-domain sources are in fact very similar to the sources they would spontaneously evoke. Concerning interdomain sources, the main problem for novices would be that they cannot envision the potential utility of such sources, these sources looking for them too far from the object to design. Such results can lead to useful benefits in two areas: enhancing novices’ analogical thinking and supporting expert designers in producing creative ideas. • For novices, in order to enhance analogical thinking, it appears necessary to go further than simply suggesting intra- or interdomain sources. Pedagogical actions during design education could be particularly useful for novices in order to show them how and why to use analogies for successful design problem solving (see Casakin & Goldschmidt, 1999). In particular, a specific guidance should lead them to adopt various points of view on the suggested sources, as well as to connect these sources with the object to design. For instance, novices could get specific questions related to aspects that they do not spontaneously consider (see Bonnardel & Marmèche, 2003), such as ‘affective’, or ‘aesthetic’ ones in order to benefit more from the presentation of interdomain sources. • For experts, in order to enhance the production of new creative ideas, our results allow us to point out the interest of the use of computational systems for providing designers with large databases consisting of a lot of pictures or words potentially useful for creative design tasks (see Nakakoji, Yamamoto & Ohira, 2000). In particular, based on our findings, it seems interesting to provide designers with sources of inspiration a priori very far conceptually from the object to design. Thus, it would lead experts to extend the boundaries of the conceptual domain they spontaneously consider. Lastly, at a more general level, it could be interesting to lead both novices and experts to become aware of the usefulness of reasoning by analogy from diverse sources, in order to become more and more creative and original.
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Acknowledgements We wish to thank the professionals and lay designers who participated in this study. Many thanks also to André Didierjean, Anthony Hutton, Malory Sénéquier, Caroline Tékéressine and anonymous reviewers for their valuable contributions.
References Adelson, B. and Soloway, E. (1985) The role of domain experience in software design. IEEE Transactions in Sofware Engineering, SE-11, 1351– 1360. Amabile, T.M. (1996) Creativity in Context. Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Bisseret, A., Figeac-Létang, C. and Falzon P. (1988) Modeling opportunistic reasonings: the cognitive activity of traffic signal setting technicians. INRIA Research report no. 893. INRIA, Rocquencourt. Besnard, D. and Bastien-Toniazzo, M. (1999) Expert error in trouble shooting: An exploration study in electronics. International Journal of HumanComputer Studies, 50, 391–405. Bisseret, A., Figeac-Létang, C. and Falzon, P. (1988) Modeling opportunistic reasonings: the cognitive activity of traffic signal setting technicians. INRIA Research report no. 893. INRIA, Rocquencourt. Boden, M. (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths & Mechanisms. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. Bonnardel, N. (1992) Le rôle de l’évaluation dans les activités de conception. PhD thesis, University of Provence. INRIA, Rocquencourt. Bonnardel, N. (1993) Comparison of evaluation processes in design activities and critiquing systems: a way to improve design support systems, Technical Report CU-CS-681-93. University of Coloradojournal, Boulder. Bonnardel, N. (1999) L’évaluation réflexive dans la dynamique de l’activité du concepteur. In Perrin, J. (ed.), Pilotage et évaluation des activités de conception. L’Harmattan, Paris, pp. 87–105. Bonnardel, N. (2000) Towards understanding and supporting creativity in design: Analogies in a constrained cognitive environment. KnowledgeBased Systems, 13, 505–13. Bonnardel, N. and Chevalier, A. (2001) How do designers of web sites take into account constraints and ergonomic criteria. In Smith, M.J., Salvendy, G., Harris, D. and Koubek, R.J. (eds), Usability Evaluation and Interface Design. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 1066– 70. Bonnardel, N., Lanzone, L. and Sumner, S. (2003) Designing web sites: opportunistic actions and cognitive effort of lay-designers. Cognitive Science Quarterly, 3, 25–56. Bonnardel, N. and Marmèche, E. (2003) Supporting the evocation process in creative design. In Stephanidis, C. and Jacko, J. (eds), HumanComputer Interaction: Theory and Practice, part II. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah NJ, pp. 1158–62.
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Casakin, H. and Goldschmidt, G. (1999) Expertise and the use of visual analogy: implications for design education. Design Studies, 20, 153–75. Chevalier, A. and Ivory, M.Y. (2003) Can novice designers apply usability criteria and recommendations to make web sites easier to use? In Jacko, J. and Stephanidis, C. (eds), Human-Computer Interaction, Theory and Practice, part 1. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah NJ, pp. 58–62. Chi, M.T.H., Feltovich, P.H. and Glaser, R. (1981) Categorization and Representation of Physics Problems by Experts and Novices. Cognitive Science, 5, 121–252. Cross, N. and Dorst, K. (1999) Co-evolution of problem and solution spaces in creative design. In Gero, J.S. and Maher, M.L. (eds), Computational Models of Creative Design IV. Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, University of Sydney, pp. 243–62. Csikzentmihalyi, M. (1996) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. Harper Colins, New York. Darses, F. (1994) Gestion de contraintes dans la résolution de problèmes de conception. PhD thesis, University of Paris 8. INRIA, Rocquencourt. Détienne, F. (2001) Psychology of Software Design. Springer, Heidelberg. Dewulf, S. and Baillie, C. (1999) CASE – Creativity in Art, Science and Engineering: How to foster creativity. Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London. Didierjean, A. and Marmèche, E. (2003) Generalization and Transfer: The role of specific cases. In Colombus, F. (ed.), Advances in Psychology Research. Nova Science Publishers, New York, pp. 35–56. Dorst, K. (1997) Describing Design – A comparison of paradigms, PhD Thesis Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft. Dorst, K. and Cross, N. (2001) Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem-solution. Design Studies, 22, 425–37. Duncker, K. (1945) On problem solving, Psychological Monographs, 270 (whole issue). Eatsman, C.M. (1969) Cognitive processes and illdefined problems: a case study from design. In Proceedings of the First Joint International Conference on I.A. Washington, DC, pp. 669–90. Ericsson, K.A. and Simon, H. (1993) Protocol analysis: Verbal reports as data (Revised version). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Falzon, P., Bisseret, A., Bonnardel, N., Darses, F., Détienne, F. and Visser, W. (1990) Les activités de conception: l’approche de l’ergonomie cognitive. Actes du colloque ‘Recherches sur le design’. UTC, Compiègne. Finke, R.A., Ward, T.B. and Smith, S.S. (1992) Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fischer, G. (2000) Social creativity, symmetry of ignorance and meta-design. Knowledge-based systems, 13, 527–37. Fustier, M. (1989) La résolution de problème: méthodologie de l’action. Editions ESF & Librairies Techniques, Paris. Gero, J.S. and Mc Neill, T. (1998) An approach to the analysis of design protocols. Design Studies, 19, 21–61.
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Guindon, R. (1990) Knowledge exploited by experts during software system design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Special issue: What Programmers Know, 33(3), 279–304. Hayes-Roth, B. and Hayes-Roth, F. (1979) A cognitive model of planning. Cognitive Science, 3, 275– 310. Jansson, D.G. and Smith, S.M. (1989) Design fixation, Proceedings of the Engineering Design Research Conference. University of Massachussetts, National Science Foundation, Amherst, pp. 53– 76. Jansson, D.G. and Smith, S.M. (1991) Design fixation. Design Studies, 12, 3–11. Jeffries, R., Turner, A.A., Polson, P.G. and Atwood, M.E. (1981) The processes involved in designing software. In: Anderson, J.R. (ed.), Cognitive skills and their acquisition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale, N.J. 255–283. Koestler, A. (1975) The Act of Creation. Picador, London. Kolodner, J.L. (1993) Understanding creativity: A case-based approach. In Wess, S., Althoff K-D. and Richter, M.M. (eds), Topics in Case-Base Reasoning, Lectures Notes in Artificial Intelligence, n∞ 837. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, pp. 3–20. Liu, Y.T. (2000) Creativity or novelty? Design Studies, 21, 261–76. Luchins, A.S. (1942) Mechanization in problemsolving, Psychological Monographs, 248 (whole issue). Maier, N.R.F. (1931) Resoning in humans: II. The solution of a problem and its appearance in consciousness. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 12, 181–94. Malhotra, A., Thomas, J.C., Carroll, J.M. and Miller, L.A. (1980) Cognitive processes in design. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 12, 119–40. Marsh, R.L., Landau, J.D. and Hicks, J.L. (1996) How examples may (and may not) constrain creativity. Memory & Cognition, 24, 669–80. Mumford, M.D., Mobley, M.I., Uhlman, C.E., Reiter-Palmon, R. and Doares, L.M. (1991) Process analytic models of creative capacities. Creativity Research Journal, 4, 91–122. Nakakoji, K., Yamamoto, Y. and Ohira, M. (2000) Computational support for collective creativity. Knowledge-Based Systems, 13, 451–58. Nickerson, R.S. (1999) Enhancing creativity. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 392–430. Nielsen, J. (1993) Usability Engineering. A. P. Professional, New Jersey. Nielsen, J. (2000) Designing Web Usability. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis. Norman, D.A. (1993) The things that make us smart. Addison-Wesley, Reading MA. Osborn, A. (1963) Applied imagination: Principles and procedures of creative thinking. Scribner’s, New York. Piolat, A. and Pélissier, A. (1998) Etude de la rédaction de textes: contraintes théoriques et méthodes de recherche. In Piolat, A. and Pélissier, A. (eds), La rédaction de textes: Approche cognitive. Delachaux & Niestlé, Neuchâtel, pp. 225–69.
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Purcell, A.T. and Gero, J.S. (1992) The effects of examples on the results of a design activity. Knowledge-Based Systems Journal, 5, 82–91. Reitman, W. (1964) Heuristic decision procedures, open constraints, and the structure of ill-defined problems. In Shelley, M.W. and Bryan G.L. (eds), Human Judgements and Optimality. John Wiley & Sons, New York. Rittel, H. and Webber, M.M. (1984) Planning problems are wicked Problems. In N. Cross (Ed.), Developments in Design Methodology. John Wiley & Sons, New York, pp. 135–44. Runco, M.A. and Chand, I. (1995) Cognition and creativity. Educational Psychology Review, 7, 243– 67. Scapin, D.L. and Bastien, J.M.C. (1997) Ergonomic criteria for evaluating the ergonomic quality of interactive systems. Behaviour & Information Technology, 16, 220–31. Schön, D.A. (1983) The reflective practitioner. Basic Books, New York. Simon, H.A. (1973) The structure of ill structured problems. Artificial Intelligence, 4, 181–201. Simon, H.A. (1995) Problem forming, problem finding and problem solving in design. In Collen, A. and Gasparski, W. (eds), Design & Systems. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, pp. 245–57. Smith, S.M., Ward, T.B. and Shumacher, J.S. (1993) Constraining effects of examples in a creative generation task, Memory & Cognition, 21, 837–45. Sternberg, R.J. and Lubart, T.I. (1991) An investment theory of creativity and its development. Human Development, 34, 1–31. Sternberg, R.J. and Lubart, T.I. (1995) Defying the crowd: Cultivating creativity in a culture of conformity. Free Press, New York. Valkenburg, R. and Dorst, K. (1998) The reflective practice of design teams. Design Studies, 19, 249– 71. Visser, W. (1990) More or less following a plan during design: Opportunistic deviations in specification. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, Special issue: What Programmers Know, 33(3), 247– 78. Visser, W. (1994) Organisation of design activities: opportunistic, with hierarchical episodes. Interacting with Computers, 6(3), 235–38. Ward, T.B. (1994) Structured imagination: The role of category structure in exemplar generation. Cognitive Psychology, 27, 1–40. Ward, T.B. and Sifonis, C. (1997) Task demands and generative thinking: What changes and what remains the same? Journal of Creative Behavior, 31, 245–59.
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Ward, T.B., Smith, S.M. and Vaid, J. (1997) Conceptual structures and processes in creative thought. In Ward, T.B., Smith S.M. and Vaid, J. (eds), Creative Thought: An investigation of conceptual structures and processes. American Psychological Association, Washington, DC, pp. 1–27. Weisberg, R.W. (1988) Problem solving and creativity. In Sternberg, R.J. (ed.), The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Nathalie Bonnardel is an Assistant Professor in the department of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology of the University of Provence. She has studied for years designers’ cognitive processes, such as evaluation processes and analogy-making, in order to develop knowledge-based design systems adapted to the designers’ level of expertise. She conducts her studies in the research centre in Psychology of Cognition, Language and Emotion (E.A. 3273), where she is the head of the team ‘Design and use of multimedia and symbolic systems’. She is also in charge of a Master degree in ‘Cognitive Ergonomics’ proposed at the University of Provence. She previously conducted her research at INRIA (National Institute of Research in Computer Science and Automatique, Rocquencourt, France) as well as post-doctoral research at the University of Colorado and the Institute of Cognitive Science (Boulder, Colorado). Evelyne Marmèche is a Research Scientist at the CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). She has studied analogical reasoning in various areas (e.g. mathematics problems, chess games, basket games and so on). She is also interested in studying expertise in professional activities. She conducts her research at the Laboratory of Cognitive Psychology (LPC) – UMR 6146: CNRS and at the University of Provence, where she is the head of the team working on expert memory. She previously conducted her studies at the LAPSYDEE (Laboratory of Psychology, Development and Education of Children) at the University of Paris V.
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Perception of the Climate for Creativity in the Workplace: the Role of the Level in the Organization and Gender Joanna Kwas¢niewska and Edward Ne˛cka This paper reports a study conducted to examine differences between employees in managerial and non-managerial positions, as well as between men and women, in their perception of climate for creativity in the workplace. It was hypothesized that, in general, managers would perceive the climate as more favourable than non-managers, and this discrepancy should be modulated by gender. The questionnaire used in the study, conceptually grounded in Amabile’s empirical and theoretical work on creativity and innovation, was administered to 388 respondents: 229 female and 159 male participants drawn from a wide range of Polish work organizations. The results show that managers perceive the climate as significantly more conducive to creativity than non-managers do. Female employees perceive the climate less favourably than male employees, although these differences appeared smaller and less frequent as compared to the managers/non-managers comparisons. Moreover, higher positions of female participants in the organization do not improve their perception of the climate to the same extent as it does in the case of male participants. Implications and areas for future research are explored.
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umerous external and internal forces drive the changes that organizations have to anticipate and manage in order to ensure their survival and success (Isaksen & Lauer, 2002). According to many researchers (e.g. Gryskiewicz, 1999; Howkins, 2002; Majaro, 1991; Proctor, 1999), the best solution for companies to keep pace with all these changes is to find and implement creative ideas leading to innovative procedures, products and services. In other words, in order to achieve a good position on the competitive market, creative work should be encouraged. Creative work requires employees to have creative skills. This belief has resulted in numerous studies over the recent years, which have aimed at investigation of the personality characteristics of outstanding creators (e.g. Barron, 1955; Helson, 1965; Rollo, 1994), cognitive processes involved in creative performance (e.g. Finke, Ward & Smith, 1992; Ne˛cka, 1999a, 1999b; Sternberg & Davidson, 1995), and methods for stimulating creative problem solving (e.g. de Bono, 1994; Fobes, 1993; © Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
Gordon, 1961; Ne˛cka, 1992; Parnes, 1967; Stein, 1974, 1975). However, there is now a consensus that one more factor, certainly no less important, has a large impact on creativity in the place of work. This is the social environment. Within the growing body of literature examining the effects of social factors on creativity (e.g. Amabile, 1982, 1983), some studies look at the ways in which work environments and organizational climate influence creative behaviour of employees (e.g. Gryskiewicz, 1999). Isaksen, Lauer, Ekval and Britz (2000–2001) describe organizational climate as ‘observed and recurring patterns of behaviour, attitudes and feelings that characterize life in the organization’ (p. 172). Depending on the level of analysis, the concept of climate may be split into two distinct but complementary constructs, commonly referred to as psychological and organizational climate. The organizational climate, which characterizes life in an organization, consists of aggregated psychological climates. Although organizational
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climate is perceived by individuals in the workplace, it exists independently of these perceptions, and is considered an attribute of the whole organization (Ekvall, 1987). According to Amabile and her colleagues (Amabile & Gryskiewicz, 1989; Amabile, Taylor & Gryskiewicz, 1995), these perceptions, rather than the objective work environment, have a crucial influence on employees’ motivation and creativity. Creativity is usually defined as the production of novel and appropriate ideas by individuals or small groups of persons working together (Amabile, 1988; Lubart, 2000–2001). The work environment is understood as the social climate of an organization (Ekvall, 1971), although sometimes physical features of the environment are also included in the definitions (Amabile, Taylor & Gryskiewicz, 1995). Hence, the climate for creativity is the organizational climate that promotes generation, consideration, and use of new products, services and ways of functioning. It supports the development, assimilation and utilization of new and different approaches and concepts (Ekvall, 1983). There are numerous models, which aim to establish the impact of the organizational environment on creativity. The number of relevant factors influencing the organizational climate, and the relationships between these factors, differs in various models. Ekvall (1983) proposed a model in which the climate is influenced by ten factors within the organization, which affect organizational and psychological processes. This model states that the following issues may have an impact on the climate: leadership behaviour, organizational culture, mission and strategy, structure and size, resources and technology, task requirements, individual skills and abilities, management practices, organizational systems, policies and procedures, and lastly, individual needs, motives and styles. According to Amabile and Gryskiewicz (1989), in addition to a person’s own skills and motivations, individual creativity in the workplace depends on three basic components of the organization: skills in innovation management, motivation to innovate at the organizational level and broadly defined resources. One important question has been underestimated so far, namely, the question of whether organizational climates that foster creativity affect all the employees to the same extent. We need to know if all employees have the same chances to share their creative potential within their organization. Given the variety of differences in roles and functions among employees, the most striking discrepancy is perhaps the one between managers and non-
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managers. In general, managers’ practices ‘are aimed at maintaining the stability and order of the organization by coordinating, communicating, controlling, and planning the use of human, financial and material resources’ (Isaksen et al., 2000–2001, p. 174). However, it is the ordinary workers who have direct impact on how the work is done. If an appropriate climate in the company is created and maintained, these ordinary workers may be the group that are able to produce the most brilliant ideas (Getz, 2003). Although relatively little research has been conducted on the differences between managers and non-managers in perception of the climate for creativity, some conclusions can already be drawn. First, managers have greater influence on the climate (Ekvall, 1996), and are more responsible for it, than non-managers. According to Amabile & Gryskiewicz (1989), their management skills, the encouragement they give to employees and the resources they manage are the main factors that influence the climate. Second, managers have access to resources and technology that non-managers often lack. Mission and strategy is not only better known but also easier to decide upon in the case of managers. Managers’ tasks seem to be more diverse and of higher importance. Lastly, individual skills and abilities, as well as individual needs and motives of managers, differ significantly in many ways from those of non-managers (Hatch, 1997; Penc, 2000). Besides, managers may perceive the climate for creativity as more stimulating than it really is just because they are more creativity-oriented than non-managers who are expected to follow instructions. A manager’s job requires a better climate for creativity because it consists of tasks that require creativity itself. A typical job description for managers appears to match five criteria of creative work (West, 1997): range, identity, importance, autonomy of tasks and feedback. Managers are generally bettereducated and skilled than non-managers, the range of tasks that they accomplish is much wider and they have an overview of the production or implementation process, as their duties include controlling functions. Moreover, it is clear that managers have stronger influence on people within and outside the organization and they also enjoy more freedom in their choices. West (1997) states that if a certain job has these features, it will probably give more opportunities to be creative at work. However, this picture of the managers’ work environment as more conducive to creativity than is the case for non-managers may be too simplistic. Numerous studies show that there are some inequalities within managerial
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as well as non-managerial groups. One of them concerns the gender of an employee. A wide range of studies provides evidence that women tend to face more problems in their daily work environment than men. The gender factor, in turn, may lead to unfavourable perception of the climate for creativity in the case of women, regardless of their status in the company. Consequently, it can have an effect on lower motivation to share and implement creative ideas. To begin with, women in non-managerial jobs are still discriminated against. Stokes, Riger and Sullivan (1995) report that the work environment tends to be less friendly for female employees in terms of informal social structure, more demanding when it comes to promotions and more sexist regarding attitudes and opportunities to solve problems at work. Therefore, their successful adaptation in the workplace is hindered in comparison to male employees. Usually women’s situation improves when they are promoted to managerial positions, however, the improvement is limited because some additional problems tend to appear. There is a lot of research showing that, although women are usually better educated, management is a domain still associated with men and traditionally claimed to be for men (Bem, 1993; Kanter, 1977). Saltzman (1991) comes to the conclusion that for women ‘a glass ceiling of subtle discrimination’ blocks the way to the top level of the career ladder and that female employees have limited access to all the benefits. Also, the level of stress connected with performing a professional role contradictory to one’s gender stereotype seems to be high. According to West (1997), women in high positions meet far more barriers in their daily work than men, and invisible obstacles appearing on their way are painful and destructive. The review presented above suggests the following hypotheses:
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1. Managers perceive the organizational climate as more conducive to creativity than non-managers, regardless of gender. 2. Male employees perceive the organizational climate as more conducive to creativity than female employees, regardless of position. 3. There will be an interaction of gender and position, to the effect that female managers’ perception of the climate is closer to the female non-managers’ perception, whereas differences between male managers and male non-managers are much more substantial.
Method Participants Three hundred and eighty-eight employees recruited from 85 various Polish work organizations participated in the study. No more than five individuals from one company took part in the research. Overall, 159 male and 229 female employees of the average age of 31 (SD = 8.55) participated in the study. The youngest participant was 19 and the oldest was 60 years old. There were 85 participants in managerial positions, among whom there were 37 women and 48 men. Three hundred and three participants held non-managerial positions: 192 women and 111 men (see Table 1).
The Instrument The tool used in this research was called ‘Barriers for Creativity in the Workplace Questionnaire’ (BCWQ), developed by Ge˛uchowska and We˛grzecka in their unpublished MA dissertations and modified for further improvement by the first author of this paper. This questionnaire is similar to Teresa Amabile’s WEI, or present KEYS (Amabile et al., 1996).
Table 1. The Number of Participants in Managerial and Non-managerial Positions Broken Down by Gender, Age, and Years of Service in the Organization
Female employees Male employees Age Years of service Total
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Managerial positions
Non–managerial positions
Total
37 48 Mean = 32.68 SD = 8.18 Mean = 8.46 SD = 9.52 85
192 111 Mean = 30.98 SD = 8.86 Mean = 7.78 SD = 8.26 303
229 159 Mean = 31.43 SD = 8.78 Mean = 7.98 SD = 8.55 388
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However, it is not an adaptation but a new instrument based on the theoretical assumptions and construction procedures that Amabile used. G´l uchowska and We˛grzecka developed an initial set of BCWQ items from content analysis of critical-incident interviews with employees working from several Polish organizations. Each respondent was asked to describe the personal and environmental factors present in (a) a high-creativity event from his or her work experience, and (b) a low-creativity event from his or her work experience. Detailed content analysis of these open-ended answers yielded ten categories that referred to environmental obstacles to creativity. Then, the BCWQ items were developed to cover the main elements of each of ten categories, often using wording borrowed from the interview responses. Additional items concerned the major creativity components outlined in the theory of organizational creativity (Amabile, 1988). Currently, the BCWQ is a 60-item paperand-pencil instrument, also adapted for computer application, in which ten categories of different work barriers are represented. A participant rates, using a four-point response scale, how often certain statements are true about the participant’s current closest work environment. Moreover, there are two additional parts attached to the main questionnaire for experimental purposes. The first one concerns creativity, productivity and job satisfaction (twelve items). The second one includes background questions, such as gender, age, participant’s function and level in the organization, and size of the organization (seven items). It takes about 20 minutes to complete the questionnaire.
Procedure Fourth or fifth-year psychology students taking a specialization course in organizational creativity, who already had both experience and training in the use of psychological instruments, recruited the participants. The questionnaire was provided in the paper-andpencil form or via e-mail. During recruitment, it was explained to participants that the aim of the study was to obtain a broad picture of the work environment in Poland. In order to reduce participants’ anxiety, and to obtain accurate data, all employees who took part in the study were informed that the BCWQ was a survey rather than a test, and therefore there were no good or bad answers. It was strongly emphasized that the questionnaire was strictly confidential and no one except the student and his/her supervisor would have access to the data. On agreeing to take part, the participants
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were informed how to complete the questionnaire and asked to do this task individually. Once all the data were gathered and analysed, the participants who wished were informed about the general results.
Results Since the BCWQ is a relatively new instrument, we start with a presentation of its psychometric properties. Cronbach’s alpha for the whole scale was 0.94, and its value did not drop below 0.93 after removal of any single item. So, the internal consistency of this instrument is high. However, two items correlated poorly with the total score and therefore were excluded from further analyses. The remaining 58 items were factor analysed in order to check the internal structure of the BCWQ. Because missing values were removed case wise, the factor analysis was based on the data obtained from 339 participants. To begin with, we extracted the first unrotated factor and saved its factor scores for further analyses. This factor explained 28.03% of total variance. The following items obtained the highest loadings on this factor: ‘There is no room for initiative in this company’ (item 36, loading 0.768), ‘Every employee has good chances to implement his or her idea’ (item 42, loading -0.702) and ‘An atmosphere of poor mutual understanding, envy and mistrust dominates in this company’ (item 56, loading 0.678). Content analysis of items loading high on this factor implied that it represented a general impression of our participants that their place of work was not supportive for organizational creativity. Next, we decided to reduce the BCWQ items to several separate scales. Our initial objective to extract ten factors that would correspond to the theoretical assumptions outlined by Amabile (1988) appeared unrealistic. The tenfactor solution obtained rather poor psychometric parameters in terms of reliability of the majority of scales: only four scales obtained Cronbach’s alphas above 0.60. Moreover, the substance of these factors did not match with the theoretical considerations based on Amabile’s (1988) work. So, on the basis of the scree plot, we chose a four-factor solution. The factors were extracted with principal component analysis and subjected to the Varimax rotation in order to obtain as much independence between the sub-scales as possible. Factor scores were saved for further analyses. The content analysis of items characterized by high loadings on each factor suggested the following interpretation. The first factor was identified as ‘bureaucratic climate’ because it
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Table 2. Four Factors and Exemplary Items with High Factor Loadings (Decimal Points Omitted) Item
Factor loadings I
23. In this company, employees quickly get discouraged while trying to introduce any change. 32. The atmosphere of cautiousness and indecisiveness dominates in this company. 43. People in this company have problems with mutual communication. 14. I am usually rewarded by supervisors and colleagues for my initiative. 27. Supervisors often talk to employees. They ask what is wrong and needs change. 10. Every employee, regardless of position, proposes new solutions. 18. I work according to strict rules and regulations. 12. Supervisors exert strict control over employees. 25. Even minor changes are introduced only if top management decides about it. 2. I decide about the way I am doing my job. 41. I have access to materials and information that are needed to do my job. 53. I share the effects of my job with others.
consists of items that represent our participants’ complaints about lack of encouragement, inflexibility and negative attitude towards individual initiative. The second factor was called ‘good communication’ because it represents the participants’ impression that they can efficiently communicate with other employees, particularly with their superiors, concerning innovation, changes and other important issues. The third factor was identified as ‘excessive control’. It represents the feeling of being overly controlled by superiors, regulations and habitual practices of the company. The fourth factor was called ‘resources’ because it refers to the participants’ conviction that they have enough time, independence, money and other resources that are necessary to implement organizational creativity. Table 2 shows items that obtained the highest loadings on each of the four factors extracted. Concerning the reliability of the sub-scales, two items were removed from the questionnaire because they did not load on any factor above the 0.4 level. The remaining 56 items were divided into four sub-scales. It appeared that Factor 1 (bureaucratic climate) and Factor 2 (good communication) obtained very high standardized alpha coefficients (0.93 and 0.91, respectively). For Factor 3 (excessive control) and Factor 4 (resources) the coefficients were lower but still acceptable (0.63 and 0.65, respectively). Lower internal consistency of Factors 3 and 4 was probably associated with
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II
III
IV 67
65 62 70 69 68 67 60 53 61 60 49
the small number of items. The data concerning the number of items, reliabilities and basic descriptive statistics for the four sub-scales are presented in Table 3. With regard to our hypotheses concerning the role of status and gender in perception of barriers for organizational creativity, an ANOVA revealed that that there were significant differences between people on different levels in organization (managerial or nonmanagerial) concerning the first unrotated factor. Generally, managers perceived the climate in the workplace as significantly less inhibiting and more supportive, F(1,336) = 18.94, p < 0.001, partial eta squared 0.053). Gender differences, as well as the interaction between status and gender, were not significant. Thus, the first hypothesis seems to be confirmed, whereas hypotheses two and three are rejected. However, these conclusions are based solely on the first unrotated factor scores as a dependent variable. Using a MANOVA with the four factor scores as dependent variables, we observed for the first factor (bureaucratic climate) that neither status nor gender showed significant differences. The interaction of status and gender was also insignificant. However, for other factors there were more differentiated results. Participants from different status groups obtained significantly different scores concerning ‘good communication’, ‘excessive control’, and ‘resources’, F(1,336) = 7.92, p < 0.005;
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Table 3. Basic Data Concerning Four Sub-scales of BCQW Sub-scale
No. of items
Mean
SD
alpha
Bureaucratic climate Good communication Excessive control Resources
27 18 6 5
60.40 45.62 15.41 10.69
15.00 10.25 3.97 2.84
0.9320 0.9053 0.6306 0.6528
managerial non-managerial
Figure 1. The Differences in the Perception of Excessive Control between Female and Male Employees in Managerial and Non-managerial Positions F(1,336) = 10.42, p < 0.001; F(1,336) = 7.72, p < 0.006, respectively; partial eta squared 0.023, 0.030 and 0.022, respectively. These differences indicate that managers perceived their work environment as more favourable in terms of good communication and necessary resources but less inhibiting in terms of excessive control. Gender differences were significant only for the third factor, F(1,336) = 3.94, p < 0.05, partial eta squared 0.012, meaning that women, as compared to men, assessed excessive control as a more serious barrier for organizational creativity. The same factor yielded a marginally significant interaction between status and gender, F(1,336) = 2.95, p < 0.09, partial eta squared 0.009. As we can see in Figure 1,
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female managers are much more similar in their perception of excessive control to female non-managers than to male managers. In other words, the impression of excessive control is defined by gender rather than managerial status, but only in the case of women. As for men, their perception was not bad if they were managers but much worse if they were not managers. However, this interaction was rather weak, not allowing strong conclusions. Other gender differences and gender by status interactions were insignificant. Having found that bureaucratic climate is the only dimension on which there are no differences between managers and non-managers, we checked whether size of a company was important. Not surprisingly, large compa-
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nies (that is, employing more than 50 people) differed significantly from small ones on this dimension, F(1,335) = 4.20, p < 0.05. There were no differences between big and small companies concerning perceived communication, control and resources. Interestingly, there were also no interaction effects between the size of the company and the status of a respondent concerning any of the factors. This means that the perception of bureaucratic climate cannot be accounted for by the joint influence of size of the company and status of an employee.
Discussion As predicted, managers’ perception of the climate for creativity was more positive. Interestingly, the discrepancies appeared significant on the scales of communication, control and resources, but not on the scale of bureaucratic climate. This indicates that being a manager makes one feel more free to communicate things with others, less restricted by overcontrol and more resourceful. However, being a manager does not eliminate a feeling that the general climate in the company is bureaucratic and therefore inhibiting the process of implementation of new ideas. This finding may reflect something important about Polish companies. In spite of changes put into effect 15 years ago by the introduction of a market economy, there is still an over-dependence on rigid procedures, emphasis on paperwork and lack of trust with regard to the role of individual initiative and responsibility. Interestingly, although such a perception depends on size of the company, it does not depend on joint influence of size and status. The feeling of being immersed in a bureaucratic climate does not seem to disappear in the group of managers. Only size of the company, acting as a single factor, has a significant influence on this impression. In general, we can conclude that our first hypothesis is supported. We draw this conclusion on the basis of the fact that three out of four dimensions contributed to differences between managers and non-managers. Moreover, employees differing on status also differed significantly concerning the first unrotated factor, which represents the generalized impression of being more or less inhibited in one’s attempts to initiate creativity in the workplace. It appeared that managers less frequently experienced various hindrances to do with implementation of innovations in the company. This finding seems understandable to the extent that managers probably base their belief on their own experience, which
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undoubtedly is more positive than the experience of non-managers. The second hypothesis must be treated with caution because gender differences appeared significant only in reference to the third factor. The first unrotated factor solution did not show any gender differences. Thus, our expectations that women would experience their workplace climate as more inhibiting for creativity was not sufficiently supported. As for the third hypothesis, we found only one, quite weak, interactive effect concerning status and gender. Although it looks quite interesting (Figure 1), we have to reject the third hypothesis as not sufficiently supported. It turns out that being a manager rather than a regular employee is a much more important dimension than being a woman or a man. In spite of gender stereotypes, which are still alive in Polish society, women in managerial posts do not seem to feel more inhibited in their organizational creativity than their male colleagues. The only exception, and a very interesting one, refers to the factor of excessive control. It appeared that women managers responded similarly to male and female nonmanagers. To put this effect in other words, male managers differed from other categories of participants in their perception of control. Male managers did not feel overly controlled, or at least their perception of control was weaker as compared to other categories. So, the main effect of gender, though statistically significant, is probably explainable in terms of an interaction, shown in Figure 1. It is the group of male managers who differed from other participants in their assessment of how much control they experienced in their workplace. The question arises whether male managers really feel less controlled or whether their perception is less realistic as compared to female managers. People employed at the managerial posts are responsible, among other things, for creation of conditions that are regarded favourable for organizational creativity. This responsibility is probably strengthened in the course of workshops and training, in which the majority of managers usually take part on the regular basis. Thus, managers may perceive the situation in a more optimistic way as compared to non-managers. Being a woman may neutralize such an illusion, and maybe this is why female managers responded similarly to male and female non-managers. If this interpretation is valid, it may reflect women’s ability to assess climate in the company more realistically, even if they are employed at managerial posts. However, the effect shown in Figure 1 may be interpreted in another way, namely, in terms of increased control imposed
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on women in companies. Control is perceived by women as excessive regardless of their position, whereas for men this perception seems to be much weaker. Ultimately, this question must wait for further studies. The results of this study have some implications for major theories of organizational creativity. Our findings are consistent with Amabile’s (1988) conviction about the importance of freedom, on the one hand, and access to various resources, on the other hand. Two out of four factors that we were able to extract, that is, ‘excessive control’ and ‘resources’, directly refer to the model of organizational creativity outlined by Amabile. However, her model is rather broad in scope, including personal motivation and other individual characteristics, so it was not possible to address all aspects in our study. It should also be emphasized that, although the model proposed by Amabile served as an initial inspiration for the construction of our questionnaire, we were unable to extract factors that would be compatible with ten categories of barriers for organizational creativity, comprised by this model. Maybe the cultural context of our study, as well as specificity of the Polish economy as an emerging and still developing market, led to such discrepancies. Our findings are also relevant for another theory of organizational creativity, formulated by Ford (1996). Inspired by Csikszentmihalyi (1990), Ford analysed organizational creativity and managerial decision-making in terms of the individual (personal knowledge, abilities and preferences), the domain (language, customary practices, structure of the organization) and the field (persons playing important formal roles in the organization). It seems that our findings support this point of view, particularly with reference to the importance of domain-related factors. One of our main assumptions is that individual creativity does not convert into organizational creativity unless certain conditions hold. These conditions include a supportive climate, modes of communication, lack of unnecessary control and free access to resources. Our findings highlight those aspects of the workplace domain that are particularly important in fostering or hindering organizational creativity and innovation (compare Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin, 1993). Lastly, consider some limitations and methodological drawbacks of this study. First, the questionnaire seems to be better tailored to assess the perceptions of non-managers rather than managers. Although the instruction at the beginning concerns the closest work environment, some items are formulated in such a way that participants may feel confused
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whether they are being asked about the organization in general or just their own experience. This problem may be of greater significance if a participant is a manager, who realizes that his or her situation differs from the situation of regular employees, but talks about the climate in the whole company. Moreover, some of the items relate to the immediate supervisor, which was very confusing for presidents of companies, who often omitted these items. Therefore, it could be advisable in future research to improve the questionnaire so that it could be useful for all employees. It is also possible to devise separate questionnaires for measuring the perceptions of managers and non-managers. In the latter case, however, it would be very difficult to make comparisons between employees at different levels of the company. Second, there were also some limitations due to insufficient control of important variables. Not only should the domain of the organization be recorded, but also its type and size. In Poland, there are various types of companies. Most of them are already private; some of them are the local branches of international companies with their own organizational culture. However, there are still companies owned by the state. The culture and climate in these organizations, and consequently the attitudes and perceptions of different groups of employees, may vary. Third, it is very important to control the domain of work if one wants to talk reliably about the differences between female and male employees. As it was already mentioned, some sectors are stereotypically ascribed to one or the other gender. The climate in ‘typically female’ jobs may be different to the climate in ‘typically male’ jobs. Moreover, to have a very clear picture of the job performed, not only information about the domain but also a detailed job description, should be provided. If this variable was controlled, we could make a first step to knowing how much creativity certain jobs and positions require and whether the differences in the perception of the climate derive from different work environments or just different tasks in a particular job. As there are no absolute norms concerning what is favourable for creativity and what is not, this study is vulnerable to the criticism that differences between and within the compared groups actually do not affect creative behaviour of the employees. Amabile and Gryskiewicz (1989) found that appropriate levels of balance in environmental factors appear most conducive to creativity. For example, although freedom is a strong stimulant of organizational creativity, the level of innova-
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tion does not increase linearly as employees are given progressively higher and higher levels of autonomy. Therefore, in future studies the term ‘barrier’ should be avoided, whereas the word ‘stimulant’ should be used very carefully unless some norms are provided. In spite of these methodological problems, the results obtained in the current study are promising enough to suggest interesting directions for future investigations. Moreover, this research is useful not only for theoretical but also for practical reasons. Knowledge about the differences in perception of the climate for creativity can stimulate organizational changes and improvements. Employees may be right or wrong in their perceptions, but knowledge about what they think and how they feel concerning creativity in the workplace is a necessary condition to introduce really stimulating conditions. This research should also warn managers that their perception of the organizational climate may reflect their illusions rather than justified appraisal. It seems that the discrepancy between perceptions of managers and non-managers may be diagnostic in the assessment of the organizational climate for creativity.
References Amabile, T.M. (1982) Social Psychology of creativity: A consensual assessment technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 42, 997–1013. Amabile, T.M. (1983) The social psychology of creativity. Springer-Verlag, New York. Amabile, T.M. (1988) A model of organizational innovation. In Staw, B.M. and Cummings, L.L. (eds.), Research in organizational behaviour, vol. 10. JAI Press. Greenwich, CT, pp. 123–67. Amabile, T.M., Conte, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J. and Herron, M. (1996) Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 39, 1154–1184. Amabile, T.M. and Gryskiewicz, N.D. (1989) The creative environment scales: Work Environment Inventory. Creativity Research Journal, 2, 231–253. Amabile, T.M., Taylor, S. and Gryskiewicz, N.D. (1995) Technical manual for KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity. Centre for Creative Leadership, Greensboro, NC. Barron, F. (1955) The disposition toward originality. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 51, 478– 85. Bem, S.L. (1993) The Lenses of Gender. Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. Yale University Press, Yale. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990) The domain of creativity. In Runco, M.A. and Albert, R.S. (eds.), Theories of creativity. Newbury Park, Sage, pp. 190– 212. de Bono, E. (1994) Thinking Course. MICA Management Resources, Toronto.
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Ekvall, G. (1971) Creativity in the place of work. The Swedish Council for Personnel Administration, Malmo. Ekvall, G. (1983) Climate, structure and innovativeness of organizations. Report 1, FA Institute, Stockholm. Ekvall, G. (1987) The climate metaphor in organizational theory. In Bass, B. and Drenth, P. (eds.), Advances in organizational psychology. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA. Ekvall, G. (1996) Organizational Climate for Creativity and Innovation. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 5(1), 105–23. Finke, R.A., Ward, T.B. and Smith, S.M. (1992) Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Fobes, R. (1993) The Creative Problem Solver’s Toolbox. A Complete Course in the Art of Creating Solutions to Problems of Any Kind. Solutions Through Innovation Inc, Corvallis. Ford, C.M. (1996) A theory of individual creative action in multiple social domains. Academy of Management Review, 21, 1112–42. Getz, I. (2003) Vos idées changent tout [Your ideas change everything]. Editions d’Organisation, Paris. Gordon, W.W. (1961) Synectics: the development of creative capacity. Harper & Row, New York. Gryskiewicz, S.S. (1999) Positive Turbulence: Developing Climates for Creativity, Innovation, and Renewal. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco. Hatch, M.J. (1997) Organization Theory: Modern, Symbolic, and Postmodern Perspectives. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Helson, R. (1965) Childhood interest clusters related to creativity in women. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 29, 352–61. Howkins, J. (2002) The Creative Economy. How people make money from ideas. Penguin Press, London. Isaksen, S.G., Lauer, K.J., Ekvall, G. and Britz, A. (2000–2001) Perceptions of the best and worst climates for creativity: Preliminary validation evidence for situational outlook questionnaire. Creativity Research Journal, 13, 171–84. Isaksen, S.G. and Lauer, K.J. (2002) The climate for creativity and change in teams. Creativity and Innovation Management, 11, 74–86. Kanter, R.M. (1977) Men and women of the corporation. Basic Books, New York. Lubart T.I. (2000–2001) Models of the creative process: Past, present and future. Creativity Research Journal, 13, 295–308. Majaro, S. (1991) The Creative Marketeer. Butterworth Heinemann, London. Ne˛cka, E. (1992) Creativity training: A guidebook for psychologists, educators, and teachers. Universitas, Krakow. Ne˛cka, E. (1999a) Creativity and attention. Polish Psychological Bulletin, 30, 85–97. Ne˛cka, E. (1999b) Memory and creativity. In Runco, M.A. and Pritzker, S. (eds.), Encyclopedia of Creativity, vol. 2. Academic Press, New York, pp. 193–9. Parnes, S. (1967) Creative behaviour guidebook. Scribner’s, New York. Penc, J. (2000) Kreatywne kierowanie [Creative leadership]. Agencja Wydawnicza PLACET, Warsaw. Proctor, T. (1999) Creative Problem Solving for Managers. Routledge, London.
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Rollo, M. (1994) The courage to create. W. W. Norton & Company Inc, New York. Saltzman, A. (1991) Trouble at the top. U.S. News & World Report, June 17, 40–8. Stein, M.I. (1974) Stimulating creativity, Vol. 1: Individual procedures. Academic Press, New York. Stein, M.I. (1975) Stimulating creativity, Vol. 1: Group procedures. Academic Press, New York. Sternberg, R.J. and Davidson, J.E. (Eds.) ((1995) The nature of the insight. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Stokes, J., Riger, S. and Sullivan, M. (1995) Measuring perceptions of the working environment for women in corporate settings. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 19, 533–49. West, M.A. (1997) Developing creativity within the organization. British Psychological Society, Leicester. Woodman, R.W., Sawyer, J.E. and Griffin, R.W. (1993) Toward a theory of organizational creativity. Academy of Management Review, 18, 293–321.
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Joanna Kwas¢niewska is a teacher at Warsaw School of Advanced Social Psychology (Poland) as well as a creative problemsolving trainer. She has been working for numerous leading organizations in Poland. Her PhD dissertation concerns climate for creativity and its relation to creative behaviour in the place of work. Warsaw School of Advanced Social Psychology, ul. Chodakowska 19/31, 03-815, Warsaw, Poland, email:
[email protected]. Edward Ne˛cka is a Professor at Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland.
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