4.4 Culture supporting creativity

How can organizational culture support radical creativity? How can you create a system that enables radically creative thinking?

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Salu Ylirisku, a design teacher at Aalto, thinks that the group can be more radically creative than the individual. ‘I feel that I’m part of this community where we do quite radical creative stuff,’ he said in an interview. ‘But it goes beyond my own individual practice, which is pretty conventional design thinking education. Radical creativity kind of characterizes the community a bit better than the individual.’

Creative products can result from a group’s creativity, which is different from the creativity of individual group members. Both require a culture for creativity, a culture which can be readily illustrated by an improv jazz session.

Improv jazz is a style of jazz music characterized by the spontaneous creation of music during a performance. Unlike traditional compositions, which follow a strict structure and have written notes, improv jazz emphasizes real-time composition. Individual and group creativity blend in a session through:

1. Embracing spontaneity in ideas and actions. The musicians play impromptu. They use the framework of jazz standards or chord progressions as a base, but they experiment with melody, rhythm and harmonic structure as they perform.
2. Autonomy for decision-making. The musicians feel free to express their individual creativity. Each performance is thus unique, reflecting the mood, environment and personal styles of the players involved.
3. Sensitivity and responsiveness. Improv jazz is highly interactive. Musicians listen to each other and respond, creating a dynamic conversation through their instruments. The music evolves based on how they respond to each other.
4. Skill and mastery. Creativity can’t happen without a deep level of expertise. Improv jazz requires a high level of proficiency with the instrument and a deep understanding of different types of jazz, such as bebop, swing and cool jazz. Musicians have to invent music on the spot and adapt to the flow of the ensemble.

Overall, improv jazz offers an exciting and unpredictable listening experience in which the outcome is never predetermined; instead, it’s created second by second, which allows both the musicians and the audience to experience the music in the moment.

What would be needed for an organizational culture to support the kind of individual and group creativity that goes into improv jazz? In this sub-chapter, we’re particularly interested in the elements of organizational culture that might foster radically creative ideas and processes.

Walton (2014) argues that to be creative, an individual needs to relate to others on many levels but also needs to deviate from the group. The friction between the need to be connected to others (group membership) and the need to be different from others (uniqueness) is the hallmark of people who live a creative life. Group membership involves less effort, whereas choosing creativity involves taking the risk to stand out, possibly facing resistance.

According to Csikszentmihalyi (2013), most of us choose the path of least resistance by conforming to the social rules of the group. This is why we need organizational cultures to provide support for individuals and groups to engage in radically creative thinking and action.

Elements of a culture for creativity

Culture is the collection of values, beliefs, rules and behaviours that shape our ways of living. What kind of culture fosters creativity?

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There are many layers of culture: national, communal, organizational, group and interpersonal. An organizational culture is a collection of beliefs and expectations related to the mission of the organization. In everyday life, work culture is evident in the way that employees perform their tasks and communicate with their superiors, followers and peers.

Culture influences the way we represent ourselves. Being a member of a work culture also provides access to resources and spaces related to the work. In this context, culture revolves around how we consistently engage with each other and our surroundings to achieve a common objective.

Teresa Amabile, one of the pioneering psychology researchers in creativity, examined enablers and obstacles for creativity in organizations (Amabile, 2019). She investigated how events at work can impact people’s mood, motivation and creativity, as well as how they view their social interactions on the job. She collected almost 12,000 daily reports from 238 professionals who were part of 26 teams. These teams were working on major innovation projects at seven different companies. This in-depth research led to several scholarly articles on how creativity is influenced by the work environment, leadership behaviour and daily psychological experiences at work. One of the key outcomes was that in a culture for creativity, employees experience more ‘great days’ at work based on a sense of making progress and meaningful work.

Psychological safety

How to make creative risk-taking easier?

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In more recent work, Amabile and Pratt (2016) suggest that a culture of creativity is rooted in four aspects related to employees’ inner experience at work: a sense of progress in the development of the creative idea, meaningful work, emotional impact, and synergistic extrinsic motivation.

Progress in the work leads to positive emotions and intrinsic motivation, which in turn lead to further creative progress. Progress in the work is most impactful when people find their work meaningful. Leaders can fuel employees’ inner motivation by finding ways to extrinsically motivate them to engage in activities for which they already have a sense of competence or deep task engagement, while also providing them autonomy.

In addition to these four factors, psychological safety is also a distinctive enabling factor of creativity. Amy Edmondson, a professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School, is one of the leading researchers in psychological safety. In psychologically safe environments, employees believe that others will not think less of them or withdraw benefits if they make a mistake or ask silly questions (Edmondson and Mogelof, 2006). Psychological safety for creativity isn’t about believing that others’ actions will be in line with your interests or that engaging in work tasks will be inherently rewarding. It’s about believing that whatever action you take will not lead to your denigration or humiliation (Edmondson, 2004).

In a psychologically safe environment, people know that they can be themselves and engage in constructive discussions that enable the identification of bottlenecks in early phases of the creative process and the accomplishment of shared goals. They’re less concerned about what others will think of them. In teams with psychological safety, members can express opposing ideas, but the discussions remain productive and don’t negatively affect work engagement.

When the individuals in a team don’t feel psychologically safe, they’re less likely to engage in behaviours related to creativity, such as suggesting new ideas, evaluating others’ ideas, challenging the status quo, asking questions or admitting mistakes. Overall, psychological safety enables creativity by making it easier for team members to take the interpersonal risks involved in experimenting with new ideas.

Team level interaction

Is psychological safety about teams or organizations?

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Edmondson and Mogelof (2006) suggest that while personal characteristics, like being extroverted or introverted, can make someone feel more or less safe in a team, other factors also have a significant impact on the overall sense of safety within the team. Notably, factors like clear goals and team interactions, which managers can more easily influence, play a big role. This means that the makeup of personalities in a team isn’t the primarily determinant of the team’s overall psychological safety.

Another interesting finding was that different teams within the same organization experience distinct levels of psychological safety. This is because each team has its own unique dynamics. The ways that members viewed interactions among themselves and with the team leader were so closely linked that the researchers concluded that positivity of team member interactions is what contributes to the psychological safety.

Positive team interactions enabled psychological safety in both the early and late stages of a project. That means that teams should consistently pay attention to the quality of their interactions throughout the work and not just at the beginning. However, there is also evidence that for radical creativity, too much coziness in teams can compromise creativity. For radical creativity to flourish, it is  important to have enough diversity in the team, even if it means greater dissonance and more conflicts. (Eloranta et. al 2014)

Edmondson and Mogelof (2006) also discovered that an organization’s climate for innovation doesn’t strongly influence how safe individuals feel. In some cases, there was support for innovation but also significant pressure for quick or profitable results. This might send mixed signals to teams about how safe it is to ask questions, experiment or focus on learning.

Organizational culture and failure

Creating a system to openly talk about failure can enable radically creative thinking.

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Geng et al. (2022) found that an organization’s culture around handling errors plays an important role in sparking radical creativity among employees, which was measured with statements like ‘this person suggests radically new ways for doing work’ and ‘this employee is a good source of highly creative ideas.’

Every creative endeavour involves uncertainty. Leaders in a culture for creativity must therefore openly discuss the consequences of failure. Who will assume responsibility for an individual’s failure while pursuing radically creative ideas and processes?

First, individuals who propose radically creative ideas should feel supported in taking the risk to propose their ideas. When failures happen, creative individuals should be able to rely on colleagues to help analyse what went wrong and identify possible lessons. Daring to pursue radically creative ideas should be seen as an opportunity to learn rather than something to avoid or be belittled for.

Second, formal organizational procedures and practices should be in place to provide individuals with opportunities to communicate about their failure and discuss novel ideas and approaches inspired by it.

Third, individuals in leadership roles can engage in open discussions on failure as equal partners with people working on radically creative ideas and processes. By implementing a failure management culture where leaders and experts have equal psychological status in radically creative processes, experts are stimulated to seek opportunities for radically creative pursuits.

Geng et al. (2022) found that the extent to which an individual values a specific risk-taking activity influences their desire to engage in opportunities that promise a radical breakthrough. When motivated, they will try their best to deal with obstacles and failure when communicating and implementing radically creative ideas.

Organizational values

What kind of values are the best for radical creativity?

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So far, we’ve talked about five core aspects of a culture for creativity: a sense of progress in the development of the creative idea, meaningful work, emotional impact, synergistic extrinsic motivation and psychological safety. The last and sixth element is organizational values.

Values are at the heart of a culture, explaining why and how goals will be reached. Schwartz (2007) highlights the centrality of values to understanding social behaviour, because they define group culture. When some values prevail in a society, they can even influence major social change.

For instance, power and achievement emphasize self-interest and oppose universalism and benevolence, which express concern for the welfare and interest of others. Stimulation and self-direction are values that reflect openness to change and a readiness to engage in new experiences. By contrast, tradition, conformity, and security emphasize self-restriction, order and resistance to change. In which of these categories do you think creativity belongs?

In this framework, creativity is captured as a basic value under self-direction. For positive team interactions, team members must be aligned on the core values that are relevant to reach the team’s goals.

In organizational cultures with an explicit agreement on radical creativity as a shared work value, individuals might have a higher motivation towards risk-taking and expressing their creativity. Organizational and team leaders should also support the autonomy of individual experts to do their job (Chen & Yao, 2011). Zhang et al. (2022) showed that a supervisor’s support for autonomy influences employees’ radical creativity when employees are intrinsically motivated to reach specific goals and the supervisor is willing to take risks.

For radical creativity, it’s also important that work is organized in a way that supports creativity. Mechanical and bureaucratic structures and rigid tools are the opposite of how creative work should be organized (Eloranta et. al. 2024).

References

Amabile, T. M., & Pratt, M. G. (2016). The dynamic componential model of creativity and innovation in organizations: Making progress, making meaning. Research in organizational behavior, 36, 157-183.

Amabile, T. M. (2019). Educating leaders who make a difference in the world. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(1), 7-11.

Csikszentmihalyi, M., (2013). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, HarperPerennial, 480 p.

Edmondson, A. C., Kramer, R. M., & Cook, K. S. (2004). Psychological safety, trust, and learning in organizations: A group-level lens. In Kramer, R., and Cook, K. (Eds), Trust and distrust in organizations: Dilemmas and approaches, 12, 239-272.

Edmondson, A. C., & Mogelof, J. P. (2006). Explaining psychological safety in innovation teams: organizational culture, team dynamics, or personality?. In Thomspon, L.L. and Choi, H-S. (Eds), Creativity and innovation in organizational teams (pp. 1-43). Psychology Press.

Geng, Z., Xiao, M., Tang, H., M Hite, J. and J Hite, S. (2022), “Tolerate to innovate: an expectancy-value model on error management culture and radical creativity”, Management Decision, Vol. 60 No. 7, pp. 2042-2059.

House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P. W., & Gupta, V. (Eds.). (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Sage publications.

Schwartz, S. H. (2007). Value orientations: Measurement, antecedents and consequences across nations. Measuring attitudes cross-nationally: Lessons from the European Social Survey, 169-203.

Walton, A. P. (2014). The individual versus the group – A unique approach to the origins of creativity. Creativity in Business. Research Papers on Knowledge, Innovation and Enterprise, 2, 94-110.

Zhang, Y., Zhang, J., Gu, J., & Tse, H. H. (2022). Employee radical creativity: the roles of supervisor autonomy support and employee intrinsic work goal orientation. Innovation, 24(2), 272-289.