Creative Breakthrough Innovation

1. Managing Change,
Creativity &
innovation
© Patrick Dawson, Constantine
Andriopoulos

2. The Individual: Promoting Critical
Thinking
Chapter 11

3. Lecture objectives
1. Understand individual creativity.
2. Appreciate the relationship between personality and creative
achievement.
3. Explain the cognitive factors that predict creative
achievement.
4. Examine the basis of knowledge and its contribution to
individual creativity.
5. Differentiate between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and
understand how they both influence individual creativity.
6. Have greater awareness of individual readiness for
organizational change.

4. Introduction
• Creative thinking is unquestionably among the most
significant of all human activities.
• The notion that the creative people behind all these creative
products behave in different/unique ways than the rest of us is
commonly held.

5. Cognitive factors
Studies show that individuals high on general cognitive ability
often tend to:
• achieve better results on measures of the job knowledge,
skills, and techniques required (Ree and Earles, 1996).
• be better at processing information (Schmidt et al. 1981).

6. Mental flexibility
• A creative mind must be able to break from habitual
constraints if s/he is to stay open and unblocked (Majaro,
1992).
• People who are more open to experience tend to be more
imaginative and open to varied perspectives (Costa and
McCrae, 1992).

7. The ability to link remote ‘associations’
• The main problem that most of us face is our natural tendency
to see what we are taught to see (James, 1983).
• Employees try to recognize similarities and connections as
well as modify or combine existing ideas into novel solutions
relevant to their respective industries.

8. Suspension of judgment
• Creative individuals can tolerate uncertainty and hold back
from accepting the first possible solution that comes to mind
(Majaro, 1992)
• ‘Voice of judgment’ (Ray and Myers, 1986).

9. Originality of thinking and freshness
• Originality as the ability to give unusual answers to questions
or atypical responses to specified problems (MacKinnon,
1960).
• Activities assist employees to think of concepts or ideas that
are normally out with their specialization, interest, or working
routine.

10. Personality traits
• Researchers initially set out to identify the personality traits of
the creative person.
• Findings: Creativity does not always emerge from the most
nurturing environments.
• Other research (e.g. Amabile, 1988) has focused on particular
occupations (e.g. creative students, R&D scientists).
• Findings: Most creative students tended to be sensitive,
independent, unconcerned with social norms and social
acceptance .

11. Risk-taking
• Creative individuals are more willing to take a stand and
challenge the status quo (Sternberg et al. 1997)
• Successful creative professionals usually take calculated risks

12. Self-confidence
• It is often the employees’ own belief in the worth and validity
of their creative efforts that helps them override periods of
frustration during the creative process (MacKinnon, 1962).

13. Tolerance of ambiguity
• It is not so much that creative employees like chaos per se,
but that they are challenged by the richness of the disorder
and complexity (Mackinnon, 1962).
• This feeling of comfort with ambiguity can result in creative
employees bringing together previously unrelated pieces of
information or messages into new forms (McGrath, 2000).

14. Proactivity
• Individuals who are proactive tend to “identify opportunities
and act on them, show initiative, take action, and persevere
until meaningful change occurs” (Crant, 2000).

15. Need for achievement
• Creative people are generally ambitious individuals with a
strong passion to achieve (MacKinnon, 1962).
• This need of achievement is combined with a desire for
autonomy in testing their own ideas and being forward in
promoting new perspectives (MacKinnon, 1962).

16. Autonomy and non-conformity
• Creative individuals desire autonomy in their work and social
environment (Buel, 1965).
• They usually show high levels of social independence and a
lack of concern for social norms (Keller and Holland, 1978).

17. Knowledge
• One cannot be really creative unless one possesses an
adequate amount of knowledge in the particular area (Taggar,
2002).
• Data are defined as ‘observations or facts out of context’
(Zack, 1999: 46).
• Information is perceived as ‘data within some meaningful
context, often in the form of a message’ (Zack, 1999: 46).

18. Knowledge
Knowledge is defined as:
A fluid mix of framed experiences, values, contextual
information, and expert insight that provides framework for
evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information.
It originates and is applied in the minds of the knower. In
organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in
documents or repositories but also in organizational routines,
processes, practices and norms.
Davenport and Prusak (1998: 5)

19. Formal or Explicit knowledge
• Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) define formal or explicit
knowledge as knowledge that can be articulated.

20. Why is it important to creative
achievement?
• knowledge acts as a store of building data for novel
combinations (Whitfield, 1975)
• knowledge makes you aware of the current thinking in your
own field or discipline

21. Why is it important to creative
achievement?
• consider knowledge as a source of opportunity to be further
exploited
• knowledge enhances creative individuals’ morale since it
enables them to add more interesting perspectives to what
they are doing

22. Informal or tacit Knowledge
• …is the knowledge that one acquires by being part of a
relevant discipline or occupation
• knowledge that is hard to express (Nonaka, 1994)
• knowledge that is rarely taught and often not documented

23. Knowledge in creativity and innovation
• Domain-relevant skills
• Hargadon and Sutton (2000) describe four processes for
creating and applying knowledge towards innovation—
‘knowledge-brokering’ cycle
1. Capturing good ideas
2. Keeping ideas alive
3. Imagining new uses for old ideas
4. Putting promising concepts to the test

24. Is knowledge always conducive to
creativity and innovation?
• Knowledge can be a double-edged sword (Andriopoulos,
2003).
• Past successes and failures comprise a precious pool of
knowledge. There is a hidden danger of conditioning in the
sense of previous patterns of thoughts or knowledge providing
the individual or team with an easy solution to current
problems.

25. Motivation
• Motivation is the distinguishing factor between what a
creative individual can do and what they actually do
(Amabile, 1990)
• The word motivation originally comes from the Latin word
‘movere’, which means ‘to move’ (Kreitner et al. 2002)
• Apart from achieving personal goals, there are also two
other motives that mobilize individual creativity (Ford,
1995):
1. There are motives related to expectations regarding
personal capabilities
2. There are emotions that directly influence motivation

26. Motivation
• There are two types of motivation (Amabile, 1997):
• Extrinsic motivation, as the word suggests, comes from
outside a person
• In contrast, motivation that is intrinsic refers to one’s internal
desire to do something
• Although creative individuals may differ from one another in
a variety of ways, they all have something in common: they
love what they do (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997).

27. Individual readiness for organizational
change
• People tend to try to maintain their state of comfort and,
thus, often guard themselves from the anxiety of change
and their perceptions of psychic danger
• Defense mechanisms are, therefore, triggered as a
protective guard
• Studies have shown that individuals’ readiness for
organizational change increases when:
(1) employees have faith in their organization’s ability to
accommodate changing situations,
(2) policies that support change exist,
(3) trust exists between peers and with leaders, and
(4) employees participate at work.

28. Summary points
• Several cognitive factors are linked to creative achievement:
mental flexibility, the ability to link remote associations, the
suspension of judgement, and the originality of thinking and
freshness
• The profile of the ‘highly creative’ individual is often
associated with a preference for risk-taking, a tendency for
being confident and proactive, a tolerance for ambiguity, a
need for achievement, autonomy, and non-conformism

29. Summary points
• As Simonton (2000: 153) notes, ‘creative individuals rarely
generate new ideas de novo, but rather those ideas must
arise from a large set of well-developed skills and a rich body
of knowledge relevant to the respective domain’.
• Although personality traits, cognitive factors and knowledge
directly affect what one can do, motivation is likely to be the
factor that will determine what one will do in terms of creative
achievement.

30. References
Amabile, T.M. (1988) ‘A model of creativity and innovation in organisations’, in
B.M. Staw and L.L. Cummings (eds), Research in Organizational Behaviour,
Vol. 10. Stamford, CT: JAI Press. pp. 123–67.
Amabile, T.M. (1990) ‘Within you, without you: the social psychology of creativity
and beyond’, in M.A. Runco and R.S. Albert (eds), Theories in Creativity.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Amabile, T.M. (1997) ‘Motivating creativity in organizations: on doing what you
love and loving what you do’, California Management Review, 40 (1): 39–58.
Andriopoulos, C. (2003) ‘Six paradoxes in managing creativity: an embracing act’,
Long Range Planning, 36: 375–88.
Buel, W.D. (1965) ‘Biographical data and the identification of creative research
personnel’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 49: 318–21.
Costa, P.T. and McCrae, R.R. (1992) Revised NEO Personality Inventory Manual.
Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources.
Crant, J. M. (2000) ‘Proactive behavior in organizations’, Journal of Management,
26:435-462.
Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1997) ‘Happiness and creativity’, The Futurist, 31 (5): 8–12.
Davenport, H.T. and Prusak, L. (1998) Working Knowledge. Boston, MA: Harvard
Business School Press.
Ford, C.M. (1995) ‘Creativity is a mystery’, in C.M. Ford and D.A. Gioia (eds),
Creative Action in Organisations: Ivory Tower Visions & Real World Voices.
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

31. References
Hargadon, A.B. and Sutton, R.I. (2000) ‘Building the innovation factory’, Harvard
Business Review, 78 (3): 157–66.
James, W.B. (1983) ‘An analysis of perceptions of the practices of adult
educators from five different settings’ Proceedings of the 24th Adult Education
Research Conference. Montreal: Concordia University/University of Montreal.
Keller, R.T. and Holland, W.E. (1978) ‘A cross validation study of the Kirton
adaption– innovation inventory in three research and development
organizations’, Applied Psychological Measurement, 2: 563–70.
Kreitner, R., Kinicki, A. and Buelens, M. (2002) Organizational Behaviour.
Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill.
MacKinnon, D.W. (1960) ‘Genvs architectvs creator varietas Americanvs’, AIA
Journal, (September): 31–5.
Majaro, S. (1992) Managing Ideas for Profit—The Creative Gap. London:
McGraw-Hill.
McGrath, J.E. (2000) ‘The study of groups: past, present and future’, Personality
and Social Psychology Review, 4: 95–105.
Nonaka, I. (1994) ‘A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation’,
Organization Science, 5: 14–37.

32. References
Nonaka, I. and Takeuchi, H. (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How
Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Ray, M. and Myers, R. (1986) Creativity in Business. New York: Doubleday.
Ree, M.J. and Earles, J.A. (1996) ‘Predicting occupational criteria: not much more
than g’, in I. Dennis and P. Tapsfield (eds), Human Abilities: Their Nature and
Measurement. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Schmidt, F.L., Hunter, J.E. and Pearlman, K. (1981) ‘Task differences as
moderators of aptitude test validity in selection: a red herring’, Journal of
Applied Psychology, 66: 166–85.
Simonton, D. K. (2000) ‘Creativity: Cognitive, developmental, personal and social
aspects’, American Psychologist, 55: 151-8
Sternberg, R.J., O’Hara, L.A. and Lubart, T.I. (1997) ‘Creativity as investment’,
California Management Review, 40 (1): 8–21.
Taggar, S. (2002) ‘Individual creativity and group ability to utilize individual
creative resources: a multilevel model’, Academy of Management Journal, 45:
315–31.
Whitfield, R.R. (1975) Creativity in Industry. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Zack, M.H. (1999) ‘Managing codified knowledge’, Sloan Management Review,
40 (4): 45–58.