Elsevier

The Leadership Quarterly

Volume 15, Issue 1, February 2004, Pages 33-53
The Leadership Quarterly

What leaders need to know: A review of social and contextual factors that can foster or hinder creativity

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.12.004Get rights and content

Abstract

This article provides a current review of research examining contextual factors that can either foster or hinder employee creativity at the individual, job, group, and organizational level. Specifically, we examine the role of leadership and the use of different human resource practices for developing a work context that is supportive of creativity. Finally, based on our review, we discuss practical implications for managers, propose areas that need further research attention, and highlight possible new directions for future research.

Introduction

Increasingly, creativity has become valued across a variety of tasks, occupations, and industries. In today's fast-paced dynamic work environment, managers continue to realize that to remain competitive they need their employees to be actively involved in their work and trying to generate novel and appropriate products, processes, and approaches. Although the level of creativity required and the importance of creativity can differ depending on the tasks or job in question, most managers would agree that there is room, in almost every job, for employees to be more creative. Further, because individual creativity provides the foundation for organizational creativity and innovation (Amabile, 1988), and these have been linked to firm performance and survival (Nystrom, 1990), it is important, if not critical, that employees are creative in their work.

While a fair amount is known about personality characteristics associated with creative individuals (i.e., Amabile, 1996), there is an increasing need for a greater understanding of the contextual factors that may enhance or discourage employees' creativity as well as the interaction between personal characteristics and the work environment. Further, it is important to identify the role that leadership can play in encouraging employee creativity. That is, most managers would say that they would like their employees to be more creative, but it has not always been clear how managers should lead for creative performance to occur.

To date, the focus of prior work on the importance of leadership for creativity (e.g., Mumford, Scott, Gaddis, & Strange, 2002) has predominantly centered on the relationship between leader behaviors and employee creativity and the creativity of the leader themselves (Sternberg & Vroom, 2002). However, an area where leaders can have a strong impact on employee creativity is through their influence on the context within which employees work. Therefore, while much has been written about the direct link between leader behaviors and creativity, less has been written about the more indirect, yet potentially equally or more important, relationship among leadership, context, and creativity. In this article, we focus on how human resource practices can be used by leaders to develop a work context that ultimately enhances their employees' creativity. As such, we complement the work of Mumford et al. (2002) on leading creative people, where they theorized about the specific attributes of leadership that are related to creativity and innovation, such as influence tactics. To this end, we begin by first defining creativity. Next, we provide an overview of recent theory and research that has examined social and contextual factors that can influence creativity. Following this review, we examine the role that leadership can play in developing and maintaining an environment that positively affects employee creativity.

Section snippets

Leadership and the definition of creativity

Much of the empirical research has defined creativity as an outcome, focusing on the production of new and useful ideas concerning products, services, processes, and procedures (e.g., Amabile, 1996, Ford, 1996, Oldham & Cummings, 1996, Shalley, 1991, Zhou, 1998). Using this definition, research has examined creative solutions to business problems, creative business strategies, and creative changes in job processes Ford & Gioia, 2000, Taggar, 2002, West & Anderson, 1996. Creative outcomes can

Social and contextual factors

The theoretical works of Amabile, 1988, Amabile, 1996 and Woodman et al. (1993) serve as general frameworks that describe a variety of relevant factors that can either enhance or stifle employee creativity. Although these models do not specifically define any particular contextual factor, they present a foundation for suggesting why the context in which employees work is important for their creativity. Based, in part, on these models, several researchers have included context in their work on

Practical implications for leaders

In this review, we have tried to organize the research that exists concerning individual, job, team, and organizational level factors that should be of interest to leaders within a framework of how leaders can manage their human resources to encourage creativity. Because leadership plays a key role in providing a context where creative performance can be nourished, it behooves leaders to understand the context within which their employees currently work and to ascertain whether there is a match

Where do we go from here?

Currently, although we know about several social and contextual factors that influence the occurrence of creative behaviors, there is still a great deal that we do not know. As discussed in this article, research has begun to indicate what types of contextual features of the work environment are more or less conducive to creative behaviors. Future research should continue to examine other contextual features of the work environment and their associated human resource practices. For instance,

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