Antecedents of organizational creativity: drivers, barriers or both?

Abstract

This paper reviews academic journal articles and scholarly books focusing on organizational creativity and constructs a schematic representation of the antecedents of organizational creativity, i.e. of the associated drivers and barriers. The literature on organizational creativity is reviewed using a traditional review technique. The focus is especially on more recent developments of the discourse, and therefore this work can be labeled as a state-of-the-art review. The review shows that drivers have clearly been studied more extensively than barriers. It was also recognized that the predominant approach among organizational creativity scholars is to dichotomize the factors influencing organizational creativity, more specifically to discuss the antecedents of creativity mostly from the viewpoint of drivers. In some cases, the antecedents are discussed from the perspective of barriers, but only rarely has it been recognized that the very same factor may either enhance or inhibit creativity. In this paper, such factors are called ‘either-or factors’. The paper suggests that the organizational creativity discourse should acknowledge that it is not enough to understand what enhances organizational creativity but also which kind of issues inhibit it and, especially, which factors may work either against or toward creativity under different circumstances. The review suggests that the majority of factors are most likely either-or by nature, although it has been overlooked in the discourse due to the dichotomizing tendency.

Business model innovation: A study of empowering leadership

“…Amabile et al (1996) propose that creativity is a necessary but insufficient factor in making novel ideas; other conditions are needed for innovation to occur (De Jong & Den Hartog, 2007). In an environment of rapid changes in technology and shortened product lifecycles (Duan et al, 2018), encouraging creativity is an important management responsibility, not only in high tech, but in almost all industries (Bloomberg et al, 2017).…”

Human resource development practices supporting creativity in Finnish growth organizations

“…We consider that many of the abovementioned learning‐enabling activities may also foster creativity, remembering that this is a process of creating new products and everyday solutions and developmental work (Collin et al ., 2017), and suppose that it may require some special frameworks (see, e.g. Blomberg et al ., 2017). In previous studies, elements like autonomy and freedom have been emphasized as part of a special framework for creativity (Lemmetty & Collin, 2020), but it is unclear which practices can be used to form such frameworks in organizations.…”

“…So far, research in the field of HRD has not been able to pay enough attention to the HRD practices that are relevant to creativity (Minbaeva et al ., 2009). Thus, there is a call for greater understanding of the organizational practices that promote creativity (Blomberg et al ., 2017; Collin & Herranen, 2017). This study aims to answer this call.…”

Flexible Wellbeing and Organizational Creativity: Personality Traits Role

“…Conceptually, Derecskei (2015) referred to organizational creativity as the extension of creativity concept within an organizational framework. Other scholars defined the concept as production of valuable, novel, useful, or appropriate concepts (Amabile & Pratt, 2016;Blomberg et al, 2017), products, processes, or services (Corazza, 2016;Jain & Jain, 2017) taking place in the context of an organization and individuals working either independently or together in a multifaceted social system. For this work, the researchers defined organizational creativity as, ideas, novel research output, patents, grants, and recognition, resulting from the integration of the person(s) who creates, the process provided, and the resources and environment made available in the workplace.…”