Question

Factors That Contribute to a Creative Climate Specific to Both Individuals and Teams.Factors That Supported Creativity of Employees and Teams. Initiative That Could Strengthen Climate of Creativity

Answer 1

A climate can be seen as various aspects of the psychological atmosphere in a team and the surrounding organizational environment. The climate often conveys expectations about which behaviors and attitudes that are acceptable. In the creativity research field there has been many attempts to conceptualize the idea of a ‘creative’ climate – i.e. such a climate that facilitates outcomes that are creative.

Many components of a creative climate have been proposed during the years. Some examples are the degree of individual freedom, psychological safety, support and positive relationships among team members, vision provided by supervisors, creative encouragement, mission clarity, available resources, and even joy.

Major Factors That Contribute to a Creative Climate Specific to Both Individuals and Teams and that could strengthen climate of creativity

1. Challenge

Complex, challenging and interesting tasks and goals spur intrinsic motivation, which is a critical component of creativity. Yet here also lies an important caveat. Tasks and goals should not be too overwhelming because then the challenge risk becoming an obstacle – effectively stifling motivation.

2. Intellectual debate

When working with complex and challenging tasks, problems often surface. The nature of these problems is that they are often novel to the people that encounters them and complex in that they can be solved in different ways. To ensure that a project can move forward, many viewpoints must be heard and people must feel secure enough so that they put forward their best ideas. In organizations where there is no debate people tend to stick to “tried and true” ways of doing things – applying old solutions to new problems.

3. Flexibility and risk taking

A basic reality of creative endeavors is that they are inherently uncertain. Often, there is no valid information that ensures that an idea or an innovation is guaranteed to succeed. Even a creative idea itself may not be practical enough to be realized into a new product, service or process improvement. Thus, risk is inherently built into innovation. Research shows that tolerating this risk, not minimizing it, is the best strategy. Thus, it is crucial that organizations accept and allow risk, encourage experimentation and failure.

4. Top management support

Another salient component of a creative climate is the perception of support from top management. This support entails both espoused support; when top management communicate norms that encourage innovation, risk taking and experimentation, and enacted support. This latter form of support is perhaps the most important, since it is the amount of resources such as money, time and facilities that top management is prepared to commit to innovation. If resources are not available, employees will see through the rhetoric of encouragement, effectively undermining these efforts.

5. Positive supervisor relations

Support for new ideas by the supervisor or team leader is critical for the further development and implementation of these ideas. Especially supportive leaders listen and give feedback to ideas, and tolerate a certain degree of experimentation. Furthermore, leaders should publicly recognize and reward creative efforts.

6. Positive interpersonal exchange

Another salient component of creative climates is joy. When team members experience a sense of “togetherness” that comes with a common goal, team members will want to cooperate efficiently for their mutual benefit. This increases both team performance as well as individual performance. With increased togetherness communication is facilitated, which will allow different perspectives and keep conflict away.

7. Autonomy

Providing employees with autonomy in doing their jobs is another important aspect of a creative climate. Decades of research on innovation clearly demonstrates that innovators prefer the freedom to be self-directed and independent.

Innovation author and researcher Scott Anthony observed that in the 1950s and 1960s, the most successful innovators chose to work autonomously outside of the bureaucracy of large companies. Today, large corporations (e.g. IBM, Medtronic, Unilever) are creating so-called “corporate garages” allowing innovators autonomy in their work while still enabling them to draw on the overall resources of the organization.

8. Mission clarity

Mission clarity is another critical aspect of a creative climate that can be highly influenced by the leader. Academic and applied research clearly shows the importance of setting forth a clear mission and engaging innovators in that endeavor. The first step is often called “problem identification” and has been shown to be highly correlated with creative production and solution generation.

Because the leader typically has the most comprehensive viewpoint, his or her input in problem identification is vital. The second step in creating mission clarity is to make clear strategic decisions that set the context for innovation. These decisions send strong signals about the company’s strategic direction and the competitive landscape.

Bain and Company in a 2013 study found that setting clear, specific innovation goals and models was the single most important factor dividing top performing innovative companies from weaker performers. They suggest that creating passion for the mission by capturing the hearts and minds of innovators is also an important part of this factor.

Leaders need to ensure that innovators are given a clear, compelling, and inspirational mission that challenges the mind and engages the heart.

9. Commercial emphasis

Promoting a strong balance of practicality and originality is another important aspect to creating a climate for innovation. A solution that is original but not relevant or effective is of little use to the organization. Likewise, some solutions are practical and effective but not original.

Those solutions may work in the short term, but they are not innovative. Thus, they are easily replicated and do not represent sustainable competitive advantage.

This is why “blank slate” brainstorming doesn’t work as well as expected. Putting practical constraints on brainstorming has been shown to yield better results.

10. Resources

Just as innovation is a risky endeavor, it can also be costly. Innovators need to perceive that the organization is willing to invest the time and money necessary to support innovation and implementation of these efforts. Leaders need to purposefully plan for flexibility in budgets and in time allocation to encourage innovation.

3M’s policy allowing its engineers to take 15% of their workweek to focus on independent projects has yielded such innovations as the Post-It Note. Lavish spending on innovation is not required and it can actually be detrimental to the team’s climate for innovation.

Research has shown that an overabundance of resources can lead to complacency and that some limitation of resources leads to resourcefulness which drives innovation.

This same idea holds true for time resources as the leader must allow adequate time for innovation but also be able to make a call about when to “shelve” an idea that is not currently viable.

11. Leadership support

Finally, innovation teams must believe that their efforts are important to top management. The innovation team leader can influence this factor greatly by serving as a conduit between the team and more senior leadership. The leader must sell the importance of innovation efforts to more senior leaders and communicate them to the innovation team.

While leadership support for innovation is important overall, it is most important in the testing and implementation stages of the innovation project when resource needs become less predictable and organizational patience wears thin.