Leadership, Creativity & Innovation: Two perspectives of creativity

Two relevant studies on creativity and innovation in business environment are referred. Amabile’s (1988) componental model of creativity and Woodman’s and Schoenfeldt (1993) interactionist perspective.

Amabile’s (1988, 1999) componental model of creativity proposes that there are three key components of creativity: domain-relevant skills, creativity relevant processes, and task motivation (table 1). Domain relevant skills include factual knowledge and expertise in a given domain.  These skills can be affected by formal and informal education and training, as well as individual’s perceptual, cognitive and motor abilities. The second component was creativity-relevant skills that recently changed to creativity relevant processes. This component includes explicit or tacit knowledge concerning strategies for producing creative ideas, appropriate cognitive styles, and work styles for creative-idea production. The last component, task motivation, refers to individuals’ attitudes toward a task and their perceptions of their own motivation for working on the task. Motivation can be either intrinsic (i.e., arising from individual’s interest, involvement, curiosity, or satisfaction) or extrinsic (i.e., arising from sources outside of the task itself) in nature (Amabile, 1988).

 The interactionist perspective of organizational creativity proposed by Woodman and Schoenfeldt, ( 1993) is premised on the idea that creativity is an individual level phenomenon that is affected by both situational and dispositional factors.

The authors stress that it is the interaction of an individual’s disposition and contextual factors in the work environment that fully predicts creative performance. Furthermore, the interactionist model stresses influences across levels of analysis.

The authors argue that cross-level influences are critical in identifying and understanding individual, group and organizational factors that can facilitate creative behavior. Specifically, Woodman and Schoenfeldt (1993) describe creative performance in organizations as a function of a number of individual, group and organizational characteristics that interact in affecting whether creativity occurs. For individual characteristics they discuss how cognitive abilities, style, personality, intrinsic motivation, and knowledge are important.

For group characteristics, the focus is on norms, cohesiveness, size, roles diversity, task and problem – solving approaches. The organizational characteristics discussed are culture, resources, rewards, strategy, structure and technology. From the perspective of the interactionist model, creative persons, groups, and organizations are inputs that are transformed  by the creative process and situation, with the potential  outcome of this  transformation leading to a creative product or performance. (Figure 2).

Works by Amabile, (1988) Woodman and Schoenfeldt (1993) provide a general framework that describes a number of relevant factors that can both enhance and suppress employee creativity. Although, those factors are not defined as specific contextual factors, but rather they presented a ground for suggesting why the context in which employees work is important for their creativity West & Farr (1996).

Thus, what is common for those two conceptual frameworks is the importance given to social and contextual influences for employee creativity. The concept is illustrated in the following design. ( Figure 3).