Organisation focus on creativity

People perspective - supports and barriers

Much o f the literature focuses on people being creative within organisations (Basadur, 1992; Ekvall, 1991; Gurteen, 1998; Henry, 1991; Henry & Walker, 1991; Levine, 1994; Mikdashi, 1999; Morgan, 1989; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995; Schon, 1991). There is a concern to improve the context that the organisation provides in order to facilitate individual and team creativity of organisation members. One perspective on organisational creativity is what I have called a people perspective. Many authors

adopting this stance offer a description o f both supports for creativity and barriers that get in the way. Two recent examples of this approach are Mikdashi (1999) and Gurteen (1998).

Mikdashi’s work is o f interest as it is grounded in some empirical fieldwork and uses a meaning-making framework. The contents for his lists o f support and barriers are typical of findings in this field. Stimulants (as he calls them) include freedom, positive work challenge, organisation and supervisory encouragement and sufficient resources. This list

is worth citing here, because many o f these concerns will be noted in the data and analysis presented here in later chapters. Obstacles he finds are divided between organisation impediments and excessive workload pressure.

Gurteen (1998) has a long list of blocks, similar to Mikdashi’s, but his contribution is particularly notable for its focus on the supports for creativity coming from two sources not specified by Mikdashi. These are dialogue processes and IT enabled groupware. Groupware is seen as important by Gurteen as he sees it as actively enabling interaction and allowing the tracing and bringing together of lines of thought that would simply be impossible without it. His discussion focuses on experience of Lotus’s TeamRoom and LeamingSpace, and upon a proprietary tool of his own called Knowledge.PDP.

Another way of pursuing the people perspective is in terms of the processes that organisations need to have followed if they are to foster creativity. One o f the most popular of these during the rise and rise of corporate Japan was Nonaka & Takeuchi’s knowledge creating spiral, involving socialisation, combination, extemalisation and internalisation (Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995). A more focused study of Japanese creativity in its organisational context comes from Basadur (1992), who emphasises the importance of a framework in which Employee Suggestion Schemes can flourish, with orders of magnitude greater numbers of suggestions flowing from employees in Japan than are typically found in America. He ascribes this to the Japanese companies’ valuing of problem finding - treating problems as ‘golden eggs’ from which problem solving and solution implementation can flow.

Basadur (1992) is also an example of those authors who tend to focus upon the positive forces required to enhance organisational creativity. This literature is characterised by authors embracing quality frameworks and process orientations to improvement. A typical recent example of this school is Newman (1997), who links creativity to knowledge management. Others, such as Hunt and Buzan (1999) argue for individual thinking skills in an organisational context. Schon (1991) focuses his discussion of creativity on the importance o f seeing-as metaphorical thinking in the creativity process.

Some writers with a psycho-analytic perspective, such as Winnicott (1960) offer insights into creativity. Winnicott worked predominantly with children, but Martin (1991) and others have taken up his studies and applied them to creativity in organisations. Winnicott notices that creativity is associated with play, allowing for magic, immediacy, illusion, flow and contained emotional limits.

Focus on barriers

The classic writing on barriers to creativity is Adams (1974). He identified barriers in perceptual, intellectual, environmental and emotional domains. He suggests that these barriers are deep-seated, and that creativity is not to be obtained by trying out a few creativity techniques. Individuals can develop their skills to an extent, but an open organisational climate is also a major contributor.

The final take on the people perspective on organisational creativity is a psychiatric one. Kets de Vries & Miller (1984) offer five neurotic styles o f organisational functioning related to five individual neurotic disorders, which they name paranoid, compulsive, dramatic, depressive and schizoid. As an example of a negative approach, focusing almost wholly on what can go wrong, this perspective offers some salutary reminders about what not to do, and how creativity can be limited by sub-conscious processes which are hard to access without specialised, or, at least, highly insightful help.

So, the people perspective on organisational creativity is important for this research because it serves as a reminder that the differences in creativity between people are not solely a function of individuals themselves. Individual creativity is also influenced by the context in which people find themselves. This perspective is not made much o f here, because the focus of this research is upon individuals many o f who are self-employed and do not work for an employer.

Complexity perspective

Another organisational perspective, which deserves consideration, is the complexity perspective. Stacey has been a proponent of complexity theory with a series o f books on chaos theory. Stacey (1992) argues that a ‘preoccupation with stability (is a) primitive defence against anxiety’ (p. 8), and that ‘creativity requires irregularity and instability to shatter old perceptions and patterns of behaviour’ (p. 43). However, he is not advocating a descent into chaos, but rather he advocates ‘bounded instability’, where feedback can

lead to creativity (p. 176). A similar point is made by Battram (1998) who argues (following Hari-Augstein and Webb, 1995) that ‘The point at which our learning almost breaks down is seen as the point of real creativity and rich learning’ (p. 144). Argyris (1990), with his notions o f double loop learning and self-sealing systems is making a similar point from the negative perspective. Argyris is negative in the sense that he argues that breaking out of what he describes as ‘Model 1’ thinking is extraordinarily difficult. He speculates (Argyris, 1997) that this is because this model is hard-wired into our theories of action, and uses evidence from ethology to support this, citing research that suggests that ‘chimpanzees use Model 1 as well’.

Stacey’s systems perspective means he has a healthy regard for the place of destruction in creativity (Stacey, 1992, p. 83), and (like Weick, 1995) he recognises that organisation members enact rather than merely respond to their environments (p. 87). In a later book (Stacey, 1996) he shows how, at the border between stability and instability, non-linear feedback systems generate forms which are varied and beautiful even in non-conscious natural systems. Taking this discovery back to the world of work, a creative organisation requires managers who are ‘skilled in handling ambiguous issues, surfacing contention and generating new perspectives’ (Stacey, 1992, p. 189). He stands in interesting contrast to the people perspective, discussed earlier, because he argues against participation. Instead he advocates a role for the leader in pushing far-from-equilibrium, where spontaneous self-organising can occur.

An implication of the complexity perspective is that creativity needs to be understood from a systems perspective and that an undue focus on the creative individual may mean that much o f the subtle interplay of the system in producing creative products is lost. This leads into the last organisational framework to be considered - that of multi-level

analysis.

Multi-level analysis

Multi-level analysis is favoured by Drazin et al., 1999; Oldham & Cummings, 1996 and Woodman et a l, 1993. Drazin et al, describe the sequence of the evolution of creativity research from the early discovery and description o f creative people, via a focus on the small group (Amabile, 1983) to organisational and multi-level analysis. In the earlier stages of this evolution, they note an emphasis on outputs of creative people rather than on creativity processes. They go on to say that understanding of creativity processes in organisations can be enhanced by three practices. The first is the ‘assumption of inclusiveness’. By this term, they mean the worldview of group researchers that the creative individuals can be located in a primary group, which is the sole focus of their affiliation. This would mean that, to understand the context of the creative person, all we have to do is to study their group. Drazin’s critique of the primary group focus fits well with the approach adopted in the current research where the IPD is not embedded in a single group but operates in a loose multi-facetted context. Their second point is that creativity processes need to be examined over time. This, too, is a perspective that is here taken into account. The third practice is a sensemaking perspective on levels of analysis.

By this they mean that they have followed Weick’s (1995) framework o f intrasubjective, intersubjective and collective levels of analysis. This categorisation is different in intention and effect from the superficially similar framework of individual, group and organisation. It encourages an exploration o f the different kinds of sensemaking that goes on at each of these levels, rather than seeing the effects at each successive level as being a product o f the inputs from the lower levels. Instead, the sensemaking perspective offers a negotiated order in which sensemaking at any level, followed by sensegiving attempts (Gioia & Chittipeddi, 1991), may lead to shifts in framing of the events at the same or any other level of analysis.

Oldham & Cummins (1996) studied the effect of personal characteristics and job context variables on creativity outcome measures, and found, among the context variables that job complexity and supportive supervision were associated with creativity outputs.

An example of the impact of context on success of authors is the sensemaking study by Levitt and Nass (1989) of factors influencing the publication of college texts. They found that influences on decisions to publish were mimetic isomorphism (copying what’s already out); coercive isomorphism (what the state curriculum prescribes); and normative isomorphism (what the profession recommends). They show that second editions usually sell better than first, but that whether a book gets a second edition depends on factors beyond the control of the author. These are: what else the editor has on their list at the time, the load of work the editor is under and other factors external to the author and the ‘quality’ of their work.

Reflection

The organisational literature on creativity helps to place the work of this thesis, by focusing attention on the context in which individual creativity takes place. IPDs’ behaviour can best be understood taking account of the loosely constructed networks within which they operate. The sensemaking research in organisational creativity, in addition, emphasises the value o f a concern for creative processes rather than creative outcomes.