How to promote creativity in a research organisation

Five simple principles apply

Gleeson et.al. (1999) propose five principles for promoting creativity in R&D.  As they point out, these “are simple principles, indeed stunningly so, given the complexity of the creative process and of the institutional cultures within which R&D operates”.  The five principles are:

• Goals:  Creativity is fostered by setting both creativity and productivity goals but not by prescribing R&D processes to attain them.
• Bounded Freedom:  Creativity is affected by the psychic balance experienced by the researcher or field participant between what she/he seeks to achieve and what the organisation or group desires her/him to achieve.
• Recognition:  Creativity is enhanced by reward and recognition, as long as it is experienced as an appreciative and/or informational event and not as a means to control or manipulate.
• Social Interaction:  Appropriate peer and social interaction is an essential prerequisite to creativity.
• Leadership:  The development and communication of insightful organisational visions and leadership help foster creativity.

These factors will be examined during the lecture and participants are encouraged to reflect on them in the context of their own career.  To help us understand how creativity can be promoted, it is useful to examine the factors in the workplace that affect creativity.  The following classification of factors in the work environment which affect creativity is drawn from Amabile, Coni, Coon, Lazenby and Herron (1996):

1. Organisational Encouragement:
   • Encouragement of risk taking and of idea generation, a valuing of innovation from the highest to the lowest levels of management.
   • Fair, supportive evaluation of new ideas
   • Reward for and recognition of creativity
   • Collaborative idea flow across the organisation and participative management and decision making.
2. Supervisory Encouragement:
   • Goal clarity
   • Open interactions between supervisor and subordinates
   • Supervisory support of a team’s work and ideas
   • Lack of rigid formal management structures, conservatism and internal strife.
3. Work Group Encouragement:
   • Diversity in team members’ backgrounds
   • Mutual openness to ideas
   • Constructive challenging of ideas
   • Shared commitment to projects.
4. Autonomy:
   • Relatively high autonomy in the day-to-day conduct of the work.
   • Sense of ownership and control over their own work and their own ideas.
   • Perceived choice in how to go about accomplishing tasks.
5. Resources/Pressures:
   • Resource allocation (within limits) to a project is directly related to the project’s creativity levels.
   • Some degree of time and resource pressure can have a positive influence if it is perceived as arising from the urgent, intellectually challenging nature of the problem itself.

References

Amabile, T.M.  Coni, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J. and Herron, M. (1996), ‘Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity’, Academy of Management Journal, Vol 39 (5), pp. 1154-1184.

Gleeson, T., Russell, G. and Woods, E. (1999), Creative Research Environments.  Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation: Canberra, Australia Report No. 99/128