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Technological has proven to be a significant disruptor over the last several decades. While
entirely new products and business models have surfaced, others have gone away entirely.
The conventional wisdom would say that managers need to identify these changes and adapt accordingly,
but that's much more difficult in practice. It's not enough in today's environments to
simply adapt to what a competitive is doing. Rather, businesses today need to be at the
forefront of innovation if they are going to continue to add value for their customers.
So lets talk about what managers can do to encourage innovation in their businesses.
Innovation is often defined as the act of introduction something new. According to academic
literature, innovation starts with a creativity. Creativity is the act of producing novel and
useful ideas. Although all ideas do not lead to the next innovation, all innovations start
with an idea. If creativity is established as the starting point for innovation, then
how do managers encourage it in their organizations?
Several studies have looked into the impact that perceptions of creativity in work environments
have on the production of creative ideas. Through a series of trials managers, experts,
and even employees within a single organization were asked to determine the most and least
creative project they worked on over the last three years. Participants then responded to
questions related to the specifics of those projects, which were then compared to see
which factors varied the most for high creativity to low creativity projects.
A total of five work environment dimensions were found to differ rather significantly
between what participants deemed to be high creativity and low creativity projects, thus
leading us to believe that these factors may play a role in supporting creativity in the
work environment. These five factors included challenging work, organizational encouragement,
work group supports, supervisory encouragement, and the presence of organizational impediments.
It's important to note that organizational impediments was the only factor that had a
negative impact on creativity, while the others produced a positive effect.
Lets start out by explaining the characteristic that is often found to have one of the greatest
impacts on the perception of creativity: challenging work. Work that is deemed to be challenging
requires a certain amount of effort and focus to be performed and is also viewed as important
to others in the organization. Challenging work also has the potential to completely
absorb an employee in what they're doing. This state of almost effortlessness, known
as flow, is common with artists, athletes, surgeons and others who simply get lost in
their work. If work isn't challenging, workers can become bored and as a result less interested
in their weak. This isn't good for creativity, so it's important that managers provide challenging
assignments that help employees feel like valued and productive members of the organization.
Another characteristic found in creative work environments is organizational encouragement.
Organizational encouragement is present in an environment when employees are encouraged
to take risks and generate new ideas. Several different studies have found that when employees
are given permission to be creative, and are not concerned about the associated risks,
they produce more useful ideas. An example of providing organizational encouragement
is Google's former policy known as twenty percent time, where programmers and other
knowledge workers were allowed to spend twenty percent of their week working on a project
of their choosing. Giving employees a license to explore something that interests them has
certainly benefited Google, as services as as the popular email service Gmail were created
by employees. While providing the conditions to which employees feel free to devote time
to creativity is important, organizations must also evaluate new ideas fairly and even
reward and recognize creativity in the workplace.
Next, organizations that maintain creative work environments offer work group supports.
Often referred to as work group encouragement, studies have found that creativity can be
instilled by not only the larger organizational itself, but also the individual work groups
within that organization. Factors such as team member diversity and openness to new
ideas serve to expose employees to different ideas that are found to have a positive impact
on creativity. Many organizations today perform work using individual teams with minimal management
oversight as partly a method of fostering pockets of creativity within the organization.
Supervisory encouragement was also found to be present in organizations that were perceived
to be higher in creativity. The support of one's supervisor is important to creativity
because fear of criticism or punishment is likely to eliminate an employee's creativity.
If an employee know that his or her idea is going to be criticized, than it's very unlikely
that they would put themselves in the position to be criticized in the first place. Several
studies also point to open interactions in the supervisor subordinate relationship as
well as a sense of clarity pertaining to goals as important. Defining specific goals is important
to creativity as it provides the framework needed to help employees develop creative
ideas and increases the likelihood that supervisors will support them.
The last important characteristic of creative work environments has to do with reducing
organizational impediments. Organizational impediments includes such things as rigid
formal management structures, internal conflict, and conservatism. Any one of these characteristics
tends to limit creative thinking as employees are likely to find them controlling. Speaking
from personal experience, management structures characterized by multiple chains of management
have a negative influence on productivity since immediate feedback is often difficult.
One characteristic that is present in many creative work environment models, but is absent
from our discussion is freedom. Although intuitively the flexibility to make certain decisions
and the sense of ownership that follows is positive, studies have produced mixed results
on the impact of freedom. However do I think it's safe to say that an environment where
employees have no sense of ownership and lack the opportunity to make decisions produces
a negative influence on creativity.
Looking at today's most innovative organizations you're likely to find that several of these
characteristics are present. Accompanied by selection measures that allow the organization
to hire the most creativity applicants, producing creative work environments can create the
conditions where employees have the support necessary to exercise creativity. In doing
so, the rationale is that those creativity ideas may lead to the next big innovation,
and can certainly serve as a competitive advantage for the organization.
Thank you for watching this video on creative work environments. In next week's video, we're
going to explore Lewin's force field analysis and discuss its relevance to innovation in
the workplace. For questions, please leave them in the comment box below and I'll do
my best to get back to them in a timely fashion. If you want more from Alanis Business Academy
you can subscribe to our channel or go the alanisbusinessacademy.com where you'll find
additional content, quizzes, and more.
Thanks for watching.