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.
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Thanks for watching.