4.5 Leading for creativity

What’s the role of leadership in a culture for creativity? What can leaders do to create a positive perception of radical creativity?

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‘We were trying to develop a new kind of rubber for jet aircraft fuel lines, when one of the lab assistants accidentally dropped a glass bottle that contained a batch of synthetic latex I had made. Some of the latex mixture splashed on the assistant’s canvas tennis shoes and the result was remarkable.’

– Patsy Sherman, inventor

Patsy Sherman and her colleague Samuel Smith collaborated for three years to develop the product, finally receiving a U.S. patent and commercializing the invention as Scotchgard Protector™. Over time, the two scientists obtained 13 patents in fluorochemical polymers and polymerization processes and eventually made it to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the U.S. These sorts of creative achievements are enabled by having a work culture for creativity.

Organizational culture is an important facilitator of creativity, which is channelled from accidental discoveries to innovation or in the development of existing innovation projects and unexpected ideas for radically creative change.

Every member of a community has the opportunity to influence the development of its culture, but leaders play a more significant role. They set the tone, become role models and show that the leadership supports for creativity.

Amabile et al. (2004) suggest that employees are likely to be more creative when they perceive their immediate leaders as being supportive of them and their work. Leaders have an essential role in catalysing the key elements of a culture for creativity.

Leadership behaviours

What might happen when leaders explicitly and clearly inform their team members that they’re expected to perform their tasks creatively?

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The behaviour of leaders influences employees’ perception of their support for creativity. People generally respond to expectations. A professional role comes with two types of expectations: 1) what you expect of yourself in the role and 2) what you expect of the people you interact with.

Xu & Wang (2019) investigated how leaders’ expectations affect employees’ radical creativity. When leaders set clear expectations for employees to have radically creative goals, experts engage in behaviours that are not directly related to their role but are linked with radical creativity, such as exploration and experimentation.

But that alone isn’t enough. Nabi et al. (2023) showed that a transformational leadership style also plays an important role. Leaders must be willing and able to inspire employees to participate in radically creative activities.

Leaders who want to facilitate creative processes within their team should focus on five types of behaviour, according to Reiter-Palmon et al. (2019): support, open-mindedness, extroversion, evaluation, and building trust.

Leaders can provide support to team members for specific problem-solving processes, such as problem identification and definition. For instance, a key role played by leaders in encouraging creativity is to help their creative experts define problems that address the organization’s needs and goals. If a leader provides support in the initial phases of defining a problem worth pursuing, then the experts will be more likely to produce an original solution (Mumford et al., 2002). In addition to supporting ideation, leaders can also provide support by making resources available and recognizing the value of individual contributions.

Leaders should also show open-mindedness towards experimentation and failure. ‘Experimentation inevitably leads to disappointments, which must be accepted and learned from, even amidst uncertainty,’ says Riikka Mäkikoskela, the Head of Radical Creativity at Aalto University. As a leader of radical creativity, Mäkikoskela shows openness to uncertainty and is ready to react to potential failure. When leaders encourage free experimentation, employees become more open to new experiences, which is related to radical creativity (Petrou et al., 2023).

Extroversion involves strengthening the relationships with creative people within the team and elsewhere. Radical creativity depends on an abundance of informational resources from across the organization. Team leaders who are well-connected can provide a creative advantage (Venkataramani et al., 2014).

Leaders can also act as clearing houses for creative work, evaluating the originality and quality of the team’s creative solutions.

Lastly, trust in leadership is vital. To build trust, leaders of creativity should become role models in honest communication about setbacks and mistakes. This encourages group members to voice their own concerns, admit their moments of failure and seek help. For instance, to create a culture of openly talking about mistakes, Ed Catmull, Pixar’s former president, would join the orientation sessions for new hires and share some of the mistakes that the organization had made. He wanted to show that even though the company was successful, they didn’t do everything right. When people see a leader being transparent about mistakes, they start to gain a sense of trust.

Team members’ motivations for creativity

How leaders can create the conditions for radical creativity in organizations

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For the remainder of this sub-chapter, we direct our attention towards the personal characteristics and motivations of experts to engage in radically creative actions. We’ll discuss three individual drivers to engage in high-risk projects in organizational settings.

First, people’s identities play a part in their motivation for creativity. Someone’s identity can shape the way they perform and the choices they make in their professional roles. Leadership can support people to find their place as recognized experts in the group by giving them the chance to express both their individualistic and interdependent tendencies.

Tang & Naumann (2016) examined the influence of team and expertise identity on employees’ radical and incremental creativity. Team identity refers to the value and emotional significance of being a member of a specific team, while expertise identity refers to the centrality of aspects of specialization in how someone defines themself.

Tang & Naumann find that strong team and expertise identities both positively influence incremental and radical creativity. While it’s important to consolidate the team identity, expertise identity is more important for radical creativity, so leaders should give people with a strong expertise identity the freedom to distinguish themselves through their ideas and actions.

Liu et al. (2022) found that employees who see themselves as a part of the group are more likely to seek help from leaders than from team members, which makes incremental creativity more likely. People with an independent orientation engage in creative processes in a self-reliant manner, which is more likely to result in generating radically creative ideas.

Individual personalities also seem to influence creative performance. Zhang & Wu (2024) found that proactive personalities are more likely to engage in radically creative activities, and this connection was even stronger when leaders exhibited a transformational leadership style, trustworthiness, transparency and honesty.

To encourage creativity, leaders should learn to recognize the rewards people get from radically creative actions. People who are intrinsically motivated find the activity itself rewarding. In other cases, external motivation is needed, which might be financial or non-financial, such as promotion and recognition.

Goal orientation

What’s the relationship between different rewards and types of goal orientations in terms of supporting radical creativity?

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Rewards come in different forms: pay and bonuses, time to pursue new ventures, provision of additional space or equipment, professional recognition or verbal encouragement. Leaders can offer rewards for activities for which employees have a high level of personal interest and involvement (Amabile, 1997), but external rewards should be in keeping with the team members’ sense of fairness. Otherwise, they’ll feel manipulated, which can make people inhibited and diminish interest.

Several researchers have shown that although intrinsic motivation and extrinsic rewards both stimulate creativity, they trigger incremental or radical creativity in different ways. Intrinsic task motivation exerts a significant positive effect on radical creativity but not on incremental creativity. The positive effect of intrinsic task motivation is also strengthened when individuals show a learning goal orientation—when they reflect on their successes and failures and are interested in developing new skills or stretching to meet new challenges.

The effect of extrinsic rewards on incremental creativity was mainly seen in employees with high-performance goal orientation. Individuals with high-performance goal orientation are interested in counting the projects that they successfully completed rather than celebrating what they learned. Incremental creativity also happens when people care mainly about the results because they feel a strong connection to their organization or they really value being accepted by others (Yoon et al., 2015).

Zhang et al. (2014) investigated how pay-for-performance rewards affect employees’ radical and incremental creativity. They found that performance-based pay didn’t really affect radical creativity or intrinsic motivation, but it did increase extrinsic motivation and incremental creativity. The type of leadership also had a big effect. Under leaders who inspire and transform—transformational leadership—performance-based pay was more likely to boost both radical creativity and intrinsic motivation. But under more traditional, rule-based leadership—transactional leadership—it mainly encouraged incremental creativity through external rewards.

Another study (Malik & Butt 2017) suggests that the way rewards affect creative behaviour might be influenced by contextual factors such as job complexity, organizational culture (i.e., competitive, collaborative, innovative or traditional) and national culture (i.e., individualism, uncertainty-avoidance, etc.).

Based on these studies, leaders aiming for radical creativity should support employees to experiment with new approaches and bold ideas. When things are uncertain or risky, instead of rewarding people for meeting targets, it’s better to reward how much progress is made toward radically creative goals. Leaders should also encourage their teams to regularly share their work-in-progress and give them the specific advice and support they need. Since intrinsic motivation is a distinctive enabler of radical creativity, leaders might consider allowing experts to redesign their jobs to be more interesting.

Different rewards might work best for different creative individuals in different stages of developing and implementing a radically creative idea. With that in mind, leaders might sometimes consider personalized pay-for-performance models.

Putting together individuals to make a great team

How can leaders bring people together and support healthy relationships in the workplace?

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One last condition for a climate of radical creativity is for leaders to ensure healthy relationships both among peers and between experts and leaders.

While it’s difficult to predict how team members will interact during conflicts, leaders of creative individuals and teams can select team members who show an ability to handle conflicts. Once the teamwork gets started, leaders can constantly work to instill a culture of acceptance of interdisciplinarity and diversity, as well as modelling effective communication and psychological safety in everyday interactions.

In summary, leadership makes a huge difference. Leading for creativity boils down to four principles of interpersonal interactions, which we coin as the TEAM principles for creativity (Reiter-Palmon et al., 2019; Lahlou & Beaudouin, 2017):

• Mutual trust between leadership, teams and employees (T). When leaders talk openly about mistakes, they are more likely to be seen as transparent and trustworthy. When creative employees and teams justify their choices, the leaders will trust them to work on high-risk projects.
• Allowing high-risk actions and the freedom to engage in experiments (E). Failure may be a costly experience, but leaders must know when to take the risk and let their talented people experiment.
• Allow autonomy (A). The company has limited resources, but leaders can give their people autonomy in selecting problems and seeking solutions.
• Provide financial and other material resources for radically creative activities (M). Leaders must be good at organizing the resources needed for the exploration and implementation of radically creative ideas.

To conclude, leading for creativity requires making room for both radical and incremental creativity in your team and organization. Choose the right employees for the right form of creativity. When you want to foster radical creativity, consider employees who have a high willingness to work on bold ideas, who have intrinsic learning goal orientations and thus aren’t afraid of making changes in their work behaviours.

‘If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails.’

– Ed Cattmul, How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity

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