Critical Analysis

Theories related to the factors influencing organizational creativity,

innovation & corporate entrepreneurship

According to Andriopoulos (2001), there are five factors that have an

influence on organization creativity, innovation & entrepreneurial behavior
which can be recognized as follows. The organizational climate, leadership
style, organizational culture, resources and skills, and the structure and
systems of organization.

These factors can be either positively or negatively related to the

organization performance. How above mentioned factors has influenced the
organization is described below.

Factors positively Affecting Employees’ Creative & Innovative Behavior

on the Organizational Level

The organizational climate

is related to the atmosphere or feeling in the environment, where expression,

participation, and creativity can be boosted. To create this climate,
interaction barriers should be lowered, stimuli should be increased, the
experiment should be encouraged, and building on early ideas should be
allowed.
A democratic and participative leadership style is known to boost creativity.
The leader’s vision is important for management, while effective
communication through both formal and informal channels is also a key
factor. What’s more, constant employee encouragement and conveying
vision from the highest level to the lowest are also needed for managing
creative individuals. In addition, leaders should be able to form effective
workgroups, which involves trusting individuals from diverse backgrounds.

The term “Organizational Culture” refers to the deepest level of basic

values, assumptions, and beliefs in a group. Those values are shared by all its
members and are shown by the rites, language used, stories, legends and
myths shared by all members. An environment of innovative and supportive
people best encourages creativity. To create this environment, principles that
everyone accepts should be set and a culture that encourages risk-taking
should be developed. Moreover, individuals and teams with high autonomy
can foster creativity.

“Resources and Skills” here emphasizes human resources. It is obvious that

if organizations want to keep creative, they should hire people who are
creative in their thinking processes. The managers of organizations also have
to offer sufficient resources and training to boost creativity. Money and time
are both key factors that should be provided to employees; this is discussed
in the previous article “Sources of Creativity”.

“Structure and Systems” refers to both the formal and the informal
processes within the company. The structure and systems truly enhance
creativity & innovation when the organization wholeheartedly gives its
support. To motivate creativity the structure of the organization should be
flat to allow decisions at all levels, while evaluation should be supportive and
informative

According to( Robbins, Judge, & Breward, 2003)If an organization follows

an innovation strategy, the organizational structure must be organic. It
requires losing structure, low formalization, low specialization, and more
decentralization.

Mercy Corps maintained a nimble, decentralized organization structure that

crafted innovative solutions to a diverse range of local problems.company
was able to respond quickly to changing conditions without getting approval
for every decision from headquarters more effectively.
With the expansion resulting to company to operate in large scale in the
recent time period now company is struggling to maitaintain the creativity in
the same phase.

Country directors seems to lack in understanding on decision making within

large complex structure and in confusioon with the role ambiguity on who
needs to take the responsibility & final call on the projects whether its head
officeor specific country seems to Detroit the creativity and innvoation
nature of the company.

Conceptual model
Perhaps one of the most well-known works that links creativity and innova- tion to
various dimensions in the organization is the conceptual model of Amabile and
colleague (1996). This model is based on the Componential Model of Organizational
Innovation (Amabile, 1988). The Componential Model considers three major
components of individual (or small team) crea- tivity, each of which is necessary for
creativity in any given domain: expertise, creative-thinking skill, and intrinsic task
motivation. The Componential Model also describes work characteristics that
influence individual creativity; organ- izational motivation to innovate; resources; and
management practices. The conceptual model (Amabile et al., 1996), which is a
further development, con-
 8 [ CHAPTER 2 ]

siders more organizational aspects and consists of five conceptual categories that influence creativity and
innovation in the organization.

The conceptual model states that for the organization to be creative and inno- vative, the individuals need to
perceive high levels of organizational encourage- ment in the form of support from supervisors and
colleagues, risk taking, and a collaborative environment among others. When people perceive they have
freedom in making the choice in how to do their work along with a sense of having control over one’s work,
they also produce more creative work. Ac- cording to Amabile and colleagues (1996) resources are directly
related to crea- tive outcomes. Not only a lack of resources does impede people in their effort to be creative
and accomplish their work, but it can also influence employees psychologically in the sense that they
experience that their work is not valued. Furthermore, Amabile and colleagues (1996) talk about two types of
pressures; excessive workload pressure and challenge. When the pressure arises from the intellectually
challenging nature of the problem it can enhance creativity. Ex- cessive workload that involves a time
constraint has been negatively related to creativity. The last conceptual category in the model is impediments
which con- tain factors such as internal strife, conservatism, and rigid formal management structures that are
thought to impede creativity and decrease the intrinsic motivation of employees to be creative.

According to Amabile and colleagues (1996), these conceptual categories are related to the creative outcome
of an organization. They conclude that people produce more creative work when they experience high levels
of support and encouragement, freedom, resources, less overload and more challenge, and fewer impediments.
The perceptions of the employees are regarded as of utter importance and as influencing the creative level in
the organization (Amabile, et al., 1996).
The most important premise of this theory is that work environments impact creativity by affecting
components that contribute to creativity which represent a basic source for organizational innovation
(Amabile, 1997). There are three major components contributing to individual or small team creativity:
expertise, creative-thinking skill, and intrinsic motivation. In contrast, the main components of the wider
work environment that influence employee creativity are organizational motivation to innovate, resources
(including finances, time availability, and personnel resources), and managerial practices, such as
enabling challenging work and supervisory encouragement (Amabile, 1997; Amabile & Conti, 1999).
This model has received some empirical support in terms of the role of its motivation component as a
psychological mechanism underlying influences from the work environment on employees’ creativity,
though the other components have not received as much research attention as the motivation component
(Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham 2004; Zhou & Shalley, 2010).

Factors positively Affecting Employees’ Creative & Innovative Behavior on the

Organizational Level
CDs enjoyed considerable autonomy in designing and managing their country programs
and operations. As a result, programs across Mercy Corps’ countries spanned a variety of
sectors, including emergency relief, health, agriculture and food security, community and
institutional capacity-building, sustainable economic development, and microfinance
field driven decentralized organization structure
Innovative culture
our best ideas come from our field staff because they work in close partnership with the
communities we serve, so we encourage the field to take risks and we follow their lead
LEADERSHIP

Organizational Innovation Atmosphere

The organizational innovation atmosphere is defined by Amabile (1996) as the perception
description that the degree of supporting for creativity and innovation felt by members of the
organization on the work environment [14]. It reflects the perception of the individual about
whether the organization provide environment which is conducive learning and innovation, and
its degree. And it’s the system reflection of individual and environment, determining innovation
level of the individual and the organization (Tao Yongmei, 2012) [8]. Organizational in-
novation atmosphere including the concept of advocacy, market guidance, evaluation and
incentive, training, communication and cooperation, resource guarantee, model, authorization
(Ma Yueting, 2009) [15], will directly affect the employee’s innovative behavior, capability and
performance organization though attitudes, beliefs, motivations and values of members of the
organization. Psychological capital plays an intermediary role in the relationship between the
organizational innovation atmosphere and employee innovative behavior (Zhen Mei- rong, et al.,
2012) [16]. Lian Xins’ (2013) empirical research shows that organizational innovation
atmosphere has a direct effect on individual innovative behavior [17].

Leadership
Employees’ innovative behaviors depend on not only the cognitive style, intrinsic motivation,
psychological capital, but also the effective stimulation from the external environment,
especially the leadership and motiva- tion (Mumford, et al., 2002). Communication is the main
way that leaders transfer the management concept to the employees and effects employees’
behavior, which is more useful than other forms of communication (Wang Yongyue, 2014) [18].
Leadership improves employees’ innovative behavior through direct encouragement or setting
the goal of innovation for employees, (Wang Duanxu, et al., 2010) [19]; and also can rapidly
capture the subordinates emotional information, do evaluation and praise, to show their support
and admiration for em- ployees’ innovation.

4.3. Social Capital

Madjar (2005) believes that creativity is not the results of organizational members’ independent
thinking, but produces in the frequently interaction process between members [20]. Interaction
may promote emotional reci- procity and trust between the members which is not only conducive
for employees to share learning experience and technology knowledge, but also broaden field of
vision, promote new ideas, and generate new ideas (Yang & Chen, 2005) [21]. Lin Zifen (2013)
also believes the employees who are willing to share knowledge with oth- ers will increase their
knowledge reserve and more likely produce the innovation behavior [22].
The relationship between the customers and employees also will have an impact on the
employees’ innovative behavior. The communication with customers, on one hand, can make the
employees understand the different characteristics, needs and service development trend more
easily. On the other hand, it can improve their stock of knowledge and develop creative thinking,
promote greater employee’s innovative behavior.

4.4. Work Characteristics

Employees’ innovative behavior is also related with employees’ work experience and job
characteristics. First of

all, the related working experience would influence employees’ innovative behavior. Employees
who are famili- ar with the tasks would easily find working tips, overcome the fear of innovation
failure, and be more confident when innovating (Ericsson, et al., 1993). Secondly, because of the
need to break formulary thinking in the com- plex work, employees have to learn and solve the
new arising problems continuously, so that they would have the profound sense of innovation
and high level innovative skills. Thirdly, the working routine degree would in- fluent employee
innovative behavior. At the high rates of routine and repetition, employees who often work ac-
cording to the rules would form a solidified thought, and their innovation intention is very low
and very difficult

critical appreciation of organizational barriers to creativity and innovation

company is growing too fast and have no capacity for cater big projects
When I started as Mercy Corps’ chief operating officer back in 1997, I knew all of the CDs,”
Zimmerman recalled. “Now that we’ve grown and hired more people from outside the agency,
I’m meeting some CDs for the first time.” Indeed, Mercy Corps had hired 37% of its CDs in the
previous three years.

“Each RPD brings his/her own management and leadership style. They are working in very
different regional contexts and their CDs have diverse needs.”
demand for the TSU is far outstripping our capacity,” assessed Farrell. “My people are getting
burned out flying all around the world, and they are not able to get to know any one country well
enough to provide the kind of specialized technical assistance they need. We’ve either got to
keep growing TSU or find a new way of working,” said Farrell. This was the topic of Farrell’s
session at the Nepal Leadership con“The challenge is how do we ensure that we have high-
quality technical experts who are well- versed in the regional contexts and able to design
innovative new programs—and how can we do so without adding one new core-funded technical
support position in each of the ference
without effective operations support

critically evaluate organizational support for creativity and innovation