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When I consider all the organizations I have studied and worked with over the past 22 years, there can be no doubt: creativity gets killed much more often than it gets supported. For the most part, this isnt because managers have a vendetta against creativity. On the contrary, most believe in the value of new and useful ideas. However, creativity is undermined unintentionally everyday in work environments that were established-for entirely good reasons-to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity and control. Managers cannot be expected to ignore business imperatives, of course. But in working towards these imperatives, they may be inadvertently designing organizations that systematically crush creativity. My research shows that it is possible to develop the best of both worlds: organizations in which business imperatives are attended to and creativity flourishes. Building such organizations, however, requires us to understand precisely what kinds of managerial practices foster creativity-and which kill it. Business Creativity
We tend to associate creativity with the arts and to think of it as the expression of highly original ideas. Think of how Pablo Picasso reinvented the conventions of painting or how William Faulkner redefined fiction. In business, originality isnt enough. To be a creative, an idea must also be appropriate-useful and actionable. It must somehow influence the way business gets done-by improving a product, for instance, or by opening up a new way to approach a process. Expertise and creative thinking are an individuals raw materials-his or her natural resources, if you will. But a third factor-motivation-determines what people will actually do. The scientist can have outstanding educational credentials and a great faculty in generating new perspectives to old problems. But is she lacks the motivation to do a particular job, she simply wont do it, her expertise and creative thinking will either go untapped or be applied to something else.
Managing Creativity
Managers can influence all three components of creativity: expertise, creative-thinking skills, and motivation. But the fact is that the first two are more difficult and time consuming to influence than motivation. Yes regular scientific seminars and professional conferences will undoubtedly add to the scientists expertise in hemophilia and related fields. And training in brainstorming, problem solving, and so-called lateral thinking might give her some new tools to use in tackling the job. But the time and money involved in broadening her knowledge and expanding her creative-thinking skills would be great. By contrast, our research has shown that intrinsic motivation can be increased considerably by even subtle changes in an organizations environment. That is not say that managers should give up on improving expertise and creativethinking skills. But when it comes to pulling levers, they should know that those that affect intrinsic motivation will yield more immediate results. CHALLENGE of all the things managers can do to stimulate creativity; perhaps the most efficacious is the deceptively simple task of matching people with the right assignments. Managers can match people with jobs that play to their expertise and their skills in creative thinking and ignite intrinsic motivation. Perfect matches stretch employees abilities. The amount of stretch, however, is crucial: not so little that they feel bored but not so much that they feel overwhelmed and threatened by a loss of control. FREEDOM, when it comes to granting freedom, the key to creativity is giving people autonomy concerning the means-that is, concerning process-but not necessarily the ends. People will be more creative, in other words, if you give them freedom to decide how to climb a particular mountain. You neednt let them choose which mountain to climb. In fact clearly specified strategic goals often enhance peoples creativity.
AUTONOMY around process fosters creativity because giving people freedom in how they approach their work heightens their intrinsic motivation and sense of ownership. Freedom about process also allows people to approach problems in ways that make the most of their expertise and their creative thinking skills. The task may end up being a stretch for them, but they can use their strengths to meet the challenge. RESOURCES The two main resources that affect creativity are time and money. Managers need to allot these resources carefully. Like matching people with the right assignments, deciding how much time and money to give to a team or project is a sophisticated judgment call that can either support or kill creativity. CONSIDER TIME Under some circumstances, time pressure can heighten creativity. Say, for instance, that a competitor is about to launch a great product at a lower price than your offering or that society faces a serious problem and desperately needs a solution-such as an AIDS vaccine. In such situations, both the time crunch and the importance of the work legitimately make people feel that they must rush. Indeed, cases like these would be apt to increase intrinsic motivation by increasing the sense of challenge. WORK-GROUP FEATURES If you want to build teams that come up with creative ideas, you must pay careful attention to the design of such teams. That is, you must create mutually supportive groups with a diversity of perspectives and back grounds. Why? Because when teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations and approaches to work-that is, different expertise and creative thinking styles-ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways. Again, creating teams requires managers to have a deep understanding of their people. They must be able to assess them not just for their knowledge but for their attitudes about potential fellow team members and the collaborative process, for their problem-solving styles, and for their motivational hot buttons. Putting together a team with just the right chemistry-just the right level of diversity and supportiveness can be difficult, but our research shows how powerful it can be.
Supervisory Encouragement
ORGANIZATION SUPPORT Encouragement from supervisors certainly fosters creativity, but creativity is truly enhanced when the entire organization supports it. Such support is the job of an organizations leaders, who must put in place appropriate systems or procedures and emphasize values that make it clear that creative efforts are a top priority. Most important, an organizations leaders can support creativity by mandating information sharing and collaboration and by ensuring that political problems do not fester.
6 Tips to Help Ignite Your Creativity and Increase Your Success The list of 6 pointers below which Ive compiled from various successful people will help ignite your creativity and re-charge your motivation:
1. Try something new for 30 days This is a great suggestion which I recently heard in a presentation from Matt Cutts who is a search optimization engineer at google. Trying something new for a month is a fantastic way to re-build your creativity and whet your curiosity. This can also help you discover the thing that you love doing in case you werent sure what it was to begin with. In terms of the Internet there are countless of free and premium courses and products available in which you can learn or discover a new skill which you can use to enhance your creativity. 2. Do what you love People who make a living from doing what they love instantly have a head-start on those who hate or are indifferent to their jobs. Apart from the fact that you feel good doing what you love, you also have no negative baggage which comes from the stress and resentment of doing
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something you dont like. If you dont know what you love doing, then maybe applying point 1 above might help you. Keep your goals to yourself at least in the beginning Sometimes when you decide to muster up the courage to try something new its a good idea to keep your goals a secret initially. This may sound counter-intuitive because most people think that by making their intentions known they can increase their visibility and hence their chances of success because somebody out there might offer some help. Well thats true to an extent but in a lot of cases the people you might be sharing your goals with might not have the same enthusiasm and mindset as you, and quite often they will try to talk you out of your crazy ideas and tell you that its just too hard. Therefore, unless youre certain that you are talking to people with a similar attitude as yours, hold on to your goals and plans until youve put them into practice. Be curious When you start digging deeper into something out of curiosity, you usually find that not only do you enhance your knowledge about that thing, but sometimes you might come up with creative ideas which you would never have thought of if you hadnt indulged your curiosity. So next time you are reading or watching a tutorial about how to do something for your blog, why not delve deeper and experiment with what youve learnt and see what happens. Improve Improving yourself both in terms of knowledge and in general can only serve to benefit you and those around you. Most of us are increasingly becoming aware of the huge economic changes sweeping the worlds societies in terms of employment and what it means to be financially secure. Having a regular job for 20, 30 or 50 years until you retire is a thing of the past. The new reality is that people who can re-skill quickly and who regularly add to their existing skills will be better off in todays economic climate. Focus The ability to focus determines the outcome of the task you are trying to accomplish. Therefore whenever you set yourself a task, see it through to completion by doing regular highly focused little chunks at a time. Doing small manageable chunks can make the highest mountain seems like a mole hill.
Creativity and success are not just something necessarily reserved for a special few and now with information and knowledge so readily accessible from the Internet, cultivating your creativity has never been so easy. Therefore applying some of the ingredients above to your life will go a long way in maximizing your chances of reaching your goals.
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Fiedler states that leaders with high LPC scores are relationship-oriented and the ones with low scores are task-oriented. The high LPC score leaders derived most satisfaction from interpersonal relationships and therefore evaluate their least preferred co-workers in fairly favorable terms. These leaders think about the task accomplishment only after the relationship need is well satisfied. On the other hand, the low LPC score leaders derived satisfaction from performance of the task and attainment of objectives and only after tasks have been accomplished, these leaders work on establishing good social and interpersonal relationships.
Situational factor
According to Fiedler, a leaders behavior is dependent upon the favorability of the leadership situation. Three factors work together to determine how favorable a situation is to a leader. These are:
Leader-member relations - The degree to which the leaders is trusted and liked by the group members, and the willingness of the group members to follow the leaders guidance Task structure - The degree to which the groups task has been described as structured or unstructured, has been clearly defined and the extent to which it can be carried out by detailed instructions
Position power - The power of the leader by virtue of the organizational position and the degree to which the leader can exercise authority on group members in order to comply with and accept his direction and leadership
With the help of these three variables, eight combinations of group-task situations were constructed by Fiedler. These combinations were used to identify the style of the leader.
Figure 1: Correlation between leaders LPC scores and group effectiveness Leadership Effectiveness
The leaders effectiveness is determined by the interaction of the leaders style of behavior and the favorableness of the situational characteristics. The most favorable situation is when leadermember relations are good, the task is highly structured, and the leader has a strong position power. Research on the contingency model has shown that task-oriented leaders are more effective in highly favorable (1, 2, 3) and highly unfavorable situation (7, 8), whereas relationship-oriented leaders are more effective in situations of intermediate favorableness (4, 5, 6).
Fiedler also suggested that leaders may act differently in different situations. Relationshiporiented leaders generally display task-oriented behaviors under highly favorable situations and display relationship-oriented behaviors under unfavorable intermediate favorable situations. Similarly, task-oriented leaders frequently display task-oriented in unfavorable or intermediate favorable situations but display relationship-oriented behaviors in favorable situations.
Subjective - individuals interpretation of events is important ,e.g., uses participant observation, in-depth interviews etc. Qualitative data is more 'rich', time consuming, and less able to be generalized. Researcher tends to become subjectively immersed in the subject matter.
Objective seeks precise measurement & analysis of target concepts, e.g., uses surveys, questionnaires etc. Quantitative data is more efficient, able to test hypotheses, but may miss contextual detail. Researcher tends to remain objectively separated from the subject matter.
Give them time to grow and develop before you test them. Butterflies that have just emerged from the crysalis have wet, crumpled wings. Give them time to develop before you decide if they can fly. The reason brainstorming has become such a standby when group creativity is involved is that all criticism is put on hold during the initial idea-generating phase. Allow yourself the same freedom.
8. Take risks. It's okay to be wrong. By definition, to be creative you must consider new, and therefore untested, ideas. Einstein said that he could have ninety-nine ideas that were wrong before he got the one that was right. 9. Enjoy the PROCESS of creation. Do not focus on the result. The secret and ecstasy of creating is being in the flow, of losing yourself in the process. If you constantly break the flow to check to how the final result will look to others, to ask yourself, "Will it sell?" "Will it win?" you will subvert the process and possibly damage your creation. 10. Go ahead and DO IT! Don't wait for the perfect moment, it won't arrive. Painters paint, scrape the paint off and paint again. Writers write and delete. They don't wait until they can do it perfectly before they start. You do not need twelve sharpened pencils and perfect silence before you put pen to paper. Remember that Shakespeare wrote in an age when the whole family sat at the same table and shared the same oil lamp. It is unlikely that he had a separate study or could wait until the family had gone to bed in order to write. You CAN follow your muse.
Fixing the Distress The last objective is certainly not the least, but very often, it is the most overlooked or ignored. Fixing operational, organizational, and strategic components of the business is crucial to its turnaround success. This may require changes in management and leadership; reorganizing staff and improving skills, or improving on service and delivery. Construct a new business mission statement and vision that reflects the companys new direction. Remember to create a long-term strategy for the success of the company. Creating and following a turnaround strategy is like making a new business plan. It takes you back to the basics of evaluating each aspect of your business and the industry it serves. It helps to identify areas that are weak and gives solid resolutions to restructuring your organization. Working a turnaround strategy greatly improves the chances of your businesses ability to recover.
analysis, you can decide whether your project is viable. In the example above, you might initially question whether it is worth going ahead with the plan. Where you have already decided to carry out a project, Force Field Analysis can help you to work out how to improve its probability of success. Here you have two choices: To reduce the strength of the forces opposing a project. To increase the forces pushing a project.