Creativity and Innovation in Organizations

Current Research and Recent Trends in Management

José Ramos,Neil Anderson,José M. Peiró,Fred Zijlstra

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351401562
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

This book reflects on the increasing variety of perspectives in organizational innovation research, paying attention to the antecedents, but also to the outcomes, of innovation. Some chapters analyze the 'dark side' of innovation, including the potential negative consequences of innovative behaviors, or of defying the innovation maximization fallacy. Others explicitly consider affective responses after innovation efforts, and assume that positive or negative effects rely on the context in which innovations occur, and on the way in which people manage the process of innovation.

Several contributions adopt the dialectic approach by considering the multiple pathways and mechanisms that could lead to innovation at organizations. Most of the chapters include the interaction of actors' characteristics (from employees or teams) together with situational constraints from the task or the social context, and outline the relevance of processes like team learning; motivation variables like basic need satisfaction; congruence of motives or meaningfulness at work; dynamics of communication networks; and affective variables.

This edited collection offers a rich picture of current research and management trends in the field and contributes constructively toward promoting the dialectic perspective on creativity and innovation in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.

A constructively critical review of change and innovation-related concepts: towards conceptual and operational clarity

Kristina Potočnik and Neil Anderson

The aim of this paper is to examine and clarify the nomological network of change and innovation (CI)-related constructs. A literature review in this field revealed a number of interrelated constructs that have emerged over the last decades. We examine several such constructs—innovation, creativity, proactive behaviours, job crafting, voice, taking charge, personal initiative, submitting suggestions, and extra-role behaviours. Our conceptual analysis suggests each one of these constructs represents a specific component of CI-related behaviours. However, we also found that on occasion these concepts have been dysfunctionally operationalized with evidence of three dysfunctional effects: (a) construct confusion, (b) construct drift, and (c) construct contamination. Challenges for future research to enhance conceptual and operational clarity are discussed.

Constructs exist only in referential relationships, either explicit or implicit, with other constructs and with phenomena they are designed to represent. New constructs are rarely created de novo. Rather, they are usually the result of creative building upon pre-existing constructs, which themselves refer to other extant constructs, in an ongoing web of referential relationships. (Suddaby, 2010, p. 350)

Across the work and organizational psychology literature, there has been an increasing number of concepts associated with how employees, teams, and organizations overall attempt to enact change and modify work roles, organizational processes, and outcomes at different levels of analysis (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014). For instance, the areas of creativity and innovation, proactive behaviours, and extra-role behaviours all aim to address and explain, in one way or another, how individuals, teams, and organizations introduce and implement changes to improve the organizational functioning. Given the importance of effective change management and innovation for the organizations to gain competitive advantage and secure their long-term success, it is not surprising that the research in this particular field has flourished during the recent years. In the present paper, we coin the term Change and innovation (CI) literatures to explore the nomological network of different concepts in this field. Perhaps more than any other area, the CI literatures comprise a number of distinct but related constructs and a proliferation of sub-constructs describing what could appear prima facie to be ostensibly similar phenomena in organizations. This has led to the rather complex construct space in the CI literatures and applied research, with several interdependent constructs all having distinct value but appearing to possess at least some similarities and notable overlaps. In their recent meta-analysis, for instance, Tornau and Frese (2013) have attempted to clean-up the construct space related to proactive behaviours in particular and observed some overlaps. In our paper, however, we go beyond the proactivity alone to include several different concepts all related with enacting CI in the organizations.

Specifically, in the current paper, we examine nine constructs in these areas that have commanded increasing attention by researchers over recent years: (a) innovation, (b) creativity, (c) proactive behaviours, (d) job crafting, (e) voice, (f) taking charge, (g) personal initiative, (h) submitting suggestions, and (i) extra-role behaviours. The scarce empirical data exploring these concepts simultaneously in a single study unfortunately prevent us from conducting a meta-analysis on all these concepts. However, our approach of exploring the nomological network of CI-related constructs allows us to explore conceptual relationships between constructs that are unlikely to be empirically studied simultaneously in a single study (e.g., job crafting and innovation). Our conceptual analysis also allows us to bring into the discussion the important issue of levels of analysis which could not be meta-analytically addressed with the scarce current research.

The rationale for sampling these concepts was threefold. First, we wanted to focus on concepts that are concerned with behaviours that aim to bring about the change that benefit the organizations. Second, we wanted to include concepts that vary in terms of both breadth (i.e., from more narrow concepts, such as submitting suggestions to broader concepts such as proactive behaviours) and target (i.e., from constructs geared more towards the individual such as job crafting to constructs oriented towards wider organization, such as innovation). Third, whilst considering the first and the second criteria, we also aimed to analyse well-cited and relatively well-established constructs in the area of CI to allow deeper conceptual analysis. With these criteria in mind, we did not include other discretionary behaviours, such as counterproductive work behaviours which are considered by the organizations as against their legitimate interests (Sackett & DeVore, 2001). Also, in identifying these nine constructs, we were aware of other constructs that could have been included, such as very specific proactive behaviour-related concepts (e.g., issue selling, problem prevention, job change negotiation, revising tasks and expanding roles, etc.). However, in order to illustrate our point of a congested construct space, we limited our analysis to these nine rather major constructs. Other more specific proactivity constructs are also beyond the scope of our present conceptual critique and other authors have reviewed these constructs elsewhere (see, for instance, Grant & Ashford, 2008; Parker & Collins, 2010). Although our list of nine selected concepts is therefore not exhaustive, we believe it represents an essentially inclusive set of major CI-related concepts all concerned with introducing change in the organizations in order to improve their functioning.

Such a proliferation of CI-related concepts raises the vexed question of conceptual clarity. In other words, to what extent these concepts can be distinguished from each other, to what extent they represent truly distinct phenomena in organizations, and to what degree advances in research in each of these subdomains contribute either independently or synergistically to our understanding of CI phenomena in workplaces. In addition to this proliferation, there has been an exponential growth in the number of published research papers across the CI literatures. Figure 1 illustrates this increase from 1980 till the end of 2014.

Over this period, our keyword search comprising these nine CI-related constructs in Social Science Citation Index within applied psychology and behavioural sciences areas generated a total of almost 10,000 publications, indicating unequivocally the sheer size of the CI literatures presently. However, more remarkable still is the exponential growth in publications over the three decades covered by Figure 1: in the last 4 years alone, some 3458 papers have appeared, representing one-third of the entire total over this 34-year period. This indicates that the CI literatures have expanded far more rapidly in recent years due to the combined efforts of researchers active in these areas. The sheer volume of papers now in publication in itself presents challenges for researchers, but so do potential conceptual and methodological similarities and overlaps evident across this huge literature base.

Figure 1. Growth in published papers across the CI literatures. The literature search was conducted in Social Science Citation Index using change management (a total of 1955 results), innovation (a total of 2242 results), creativity (a total of 2730 results), proactivity/proactive (a total of 1150 results), job crafting (a total of 43 results), voice (a total of 1617 results), taking charge (a total of 106 results), personal initiative (a total of 154 results), and extra-role behaviours (a total of 176 results) as keywords. Only documents from the Psychology and Behavioural Sciences areas within the Management and Psychology (applied and multidisciplinary) subject areas are included. The total number of publications within each year category excludes duplicates across these nine keywords.

In addition to this growth in publications, several studies illustrate lack of clarity and disconnect between different CI-related constructs. Fay, Borrill, Amir, Haward, and West (2006), for instance, in their study into team innovation in multidisciplinary healthcare teams infer their conclusions to extra-role behaviours in general. Moreover, some researchers have frequently assessed creativity with measures that include items of idea implementation or have used measures of creativity to assess innovation (e.g., Shin & Zhou, 2003; Zhang & Bartol, 2010; Zhou & George, 2001), although they and others explicitly differentiate between both constructs (e.g., Bledow, Frese, Anderson, Erez, & Farr, 2009a; West, 2002; Zhou & George, 2001). Other researchers have treated proactive behaviours as a type of extra-role behaviours (e.g., Chiaburu, Marinova, & Lim, 2007), although these are supposed to be distinguishable concepts (e.g., Grant & Ashford, 2008; Parker, Williams, & Turner, 2006). Are all these sub-constructs simply the manifestation of the huge growth in research and pragmatic interest into CI, given the pace of change experienced in many organizations over recent years? Or, has this area now reached a saturated construct space with many interrelated concepts failing to ensure sufficient conceptual clarity or integration? These questions and observations drive the main aim of this paper—to review, critique, and clarify the nomological network of CI-related constructs that have developed over recent years across the work and organizational psychology literature. In so doing, we aim to provide a comprehensive narrative review of definitions and clear terminology regarding CI-related constructs, a contemporary critique of the state of the science in this area, and lastly, a set of challenges and imperatives for future theory, empirical studies, and practical implications for the CI literatures. It is hoped that our conceptual integration will contribute to guiding future research in this area towards a clearer focus and definitional clarity, moving away from dysfunctional use of different CI-related constructs, and towards synergizing across these related constructs where areas of overlap are manifested either at a conceptual or operational level of analysis.

We begin by reviewing established definitions of each construct and by analysing similarities and differences among them at the conceptual level. Next, we review the rather scarce empirical evidence attesting to their construct validity. Finally, we conclude with challenges for future research in the CI field and implications for practice.

Modelling the construct space: CI-related constructs defined

There is a variety of constructs which, according to their definitions, refer to CI in some manner or other in the workplace. As outlined previously, we identified nine concepts that represent behaviours related to changing the current status of work roles, group processes, or organizations. We present their definitions along with example studies in Table 1. Most of these definitions explicitly highlight a discretionary behavioural component; however, we can also observe that some concepts are more specifically operationalized than others. Also, we note that these concepts differ in terms of how much novelty they involve and whether they represent in-role, extra-role, or both types of behaviours. In summary, a wide variety of constructs have been suggested and studied in the CI field. The question that arises is what the boundaries, overlaps, and similarities between these constructs are. Next, we analyse each one of them in more detail. In Table 2, we summarize the main features of our conceptual analysis.

Innovation

Innovation in the workplace comprises the production of creative ideas as the first stage and the implementation of these ideas as the second stage (Anderson, Potočnik, Bledow, Hulsheger, & Rosing, 2016; Hülsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009; West & Farr, 1990). A more fine-grained approach to innovation has also separated idea promotion from the idea implementation as a separate, second stage in the innovation process in order to highlight the importance of securing support from the environment for successful idea implementation (Janssen, 2000; Kanter, 1988). Following West and Farr’s (1990) definition (see Table 1), innovative behaviours are those that benefit the organizations at some level of analysis (see also Anderson et al., 2014). Although innovation can be prescribed by the job as a role requirement and it is formally managed by the company, frequently individual employees engage in innovative behaviours based on their own initiative (West, 2002). Innovative behaviours can involve both in-role and extra-role elements: innovation might be part of the core tasks to be performed in one’s job or, alternatively, employees engage in innovative behaviours beyond their role prescriptions (West, 2002). We should also note that this widely accepted definition of innovation embraces terms such as role innovation as “role” is included among different levels of adoption of novel ideas or procedures.

Creativity

Creativity has been considered as a subcategory of innovation (or the first part of the innovation process—the production/generation of novel and useful ideas). Some authors would use the term “idea generation” (Nijstad, Diehl, & Stroebe, 2003), which in its essence refers to creativity and can thus be considered as synonymous to creativity. However, some scholars argue for a stronger conceptual distinction between innovatio...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Studying innovation in organizations: a dialectic perspective
• 1. A constructively critical review of change and innovation-related concepts: towards conceptual and operational clarity
• 2. Creative and innovative performance: a meta-analysis of relationships with task, citizenship, and counterproductive job performance dimensions
• 3. When the fire dies: Perceived success and support for innovation shape the motivating potential of innovative work behaviour
• 4. How does creativity at work influence employee’s positive affect at work?
• 5. Who will be on my side? The role of peers’ achievement motivation in the evaluation of innovative ideas
• 6. Leaned teamwork fattens workplace innovation: the relationship between task complexity, team learning and team proactivity
• 7. Uncovering the dark side of innovation: the influence of the number of innovations on work teams’ satisfaction and performance
• 8. The influence of friendship and communication network density on individual innovative behaviours: a multilevel study
• 9. Engaged teams deliver better service performance in innovation climates
• Index