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):
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.
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.
Work Group Encouragement:
- Diversity in team members’ backgrounds
- Mutual openness to ideas
- Constructive challenging of ideas
- Shared commitment to projects.
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.
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.