Stealing Fire: Creative Deviance in the Evolution of New Ideas

Abstract

What happens when an employee generates a new idea and wants to further explore it but is instructed by a manager to stop working on it? Among the various possibilities, the employee could choose to violate the manager's order and pursue the new idea illegitimately. I describe this action as creative deviance and, drawing on the creativity literature and deviance literature, propose a theory about its organizational conditions and implications. We must create antibodies even for responsibility (Elytis, 2004: 338).

Do Formal Management Practices Impact the Emergence of Bootlegging Behavior?

“…Social cognitive theory (Bandura, ) proposes that employees begin bootlegging activities if they believe themselves to have the necessary abilities for intrapreneurial tasks and that both self‐efficacy and the motivation for bootlegging are influenced by the degree to which an organization enables its employees to engage in innovation activities. With respect to strain theory (Merton, ) and creative deviance theory (Mainemelis, ), our results support that strategic autonomy is an essential precondition for bootlegging and that encouraging innovation through rewards facilitates this deviance. Creative deviance theory also proposes that structures that systematically open up legitimate means for idea elaboration while simultaneously limiting the available resources to fund only a subset of ideas, stimulate bootlegging.…”

When Breaking the Rules Relates to Creativity: The Role of Creative Problem‐Solving Demands and Organizational Constraints

“…Such types of breaking or simply revising rules and roles already exist in the literature. The nomological network of such behaviors includes concepts such as positive deviance (i.e., behaviors departing from the norm in honorable ways; Spreitzer & Sonenshein, ), creative deviance (i.e., “the violation of a managerial order to stop working on a new idea”; Mainemelis, ; p. 560), and bootlegging (i.e., working on ideas with no formal organization support with the aim of producing innovations; Criscuolo, Salter, & Ter Wal, ). In the present paper, we focus on prosocial rule‐breaking for improved efficiency for both theoretical and practical reasons.…”

Tales of the unexpected: Discussing improvisational learning

“…Subversive forms of improvisation may be powerful drivers of learning, as indicated in several learning literatures, including those on learning in communities of practice and learning as a result of positive deviance (Brown and Duguid, 1991;Mainemelis, 2010). The organizational push towards routinization and institutionalization makes organizations vulnerable to the lack of exploratory actions (March, 1991).…”