Creativity as a Conception in Which Novel Ideas are Considered Regarding Services - Essay Example

Mobilising creativity and innovation BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFO HERE HERE Reflective account Creativity is a conception in which novel ideas are considered regarding services, procedures, practices and product that could have significant value for an organisation (Clapham 2003). Amabile (2013) suggests that creativity is the highest within an individual when they are intrinsically motivated, but can also be motivated by extrinsic factors, such as the social environment. People should achieve the highest levels of creativity when they are motivated by the satisfaction, challenge and interest of work without necessarily relying on external rewards or other stimuli (Amabile et al. 1996). In my previous work experience, I was a support worker in customer service, handling customer orders and fielding customer complaints. My domain-relevant skills were proficiency in utilising the electronic computer systems at the firm and excellence at understanding the procurement process along the value chain. In the creative process, I was able to draw on these talents and knowledge bases to come up with innovative service solutions. In this organisation, the service team was not provided with a well-developed training model illustrating best practices for handling customer support issues. Hence, the management team relied on our own creative ideas to ensure that customer’s perceived a rapid response, quality of service, and ability to fulfil their service needs. When first working within the organisation, I was substantially motivated through intrinsic factors, with a genuine enjoyment for the work and the challenge of dealing with diverse and sometimes difficult customer segments. However, over time, with a track record of providing creative solutions to customers, my motivation for creative output began to deteriorate and I was unable to come up with imaginative solutions in difficult service situations. The problem was that I was receiving no external accolades for superior performance and a track record of customer satisfaction. Careful self-reflection indicated a substantial problem: I was heavily reliant on extrinsic motivators to remain motivated toward the creative task in the long-term. The organisation maintained a social norm where it was commonplace for managers to criticise new ideas and there were ample political problems throughout the organisational model, which was identified by Woodman, Sawyer and Griffin (1993) as being barriers to the creative process. However, having been initially motivated intrinsically, I should have been able to overcome these social and organizational-environmental problems to continue to provide creative solutions to customers. From a development perspective, and synthesis of literature on creativity and its constructs, I have identified a substantial deficiency requiring improvement. My creative performance was being impeded by value blocks, identified by Proctor (2014) as being a type of rigidity caused by personal value conflicts and inability to reconcile them with the values of the organisational management team. My values strongly reinforce that employees should receive acknowledgement when they exceed performance expectations and that managers should be empathetic to the employees’ needs and expectations in their job roles. I did not, at the time, realise that my value system was creating a type of emotional inflexibility that allowed extrinsic factors to dictate the level to which my intrinsic motivations were stifled and trampled. As a result, customer dissatisfaction in their interactive dealings with me became less substantial and I began to become lax in identifying creative service solutions. Hence, this underpins my need for development, to overcome the value blocks in an organisational context which I, personally, allow to undermine the creative process. I had the fundamental domain-relevant skills to draw on to come up with creative service-related creativity, however the extrinsic factors of the organisational environment diminished my creative capacities. Whilst I grew more angry and frustrated over the lack of extrinsic acknowledgements for quality service creativity, I realised that I failed to properly clarify the problem (values disparity) and generate potential ideas to solve the identified problem, as described by the Osborn-Parnes model (Van Gundy 1998). Amabile (1993) asserts that creativity will be stifled when one engages in a workplace activity for the external rewards achieved for it; a detriment to the creative process. In retrospect, the problem was that I allowed values differences between myself and the management team to create a de-motivational situation where I began rejecting putting forth the effort to identify creative service solutions that were critical to supporting customer satisfaction. One empirical study by Wayne and Ferris (1990) found that creativity can be enhanced by relationship exchange quality between managers and employees. The hierarchical organisation that dismissed such exchanges was intimidating and not conducive of encouragement for coming up with creative service solutions. Proctor (2014) identifies that enhanced creativity is borne of risk-taking and social imagination that determines new group processes conducive to better service outcomes. What should have occurred was careful reflection to identify the real problem causing creativity depletion, which in this case was strong value difference between me and the management team. I should have been more emotionally-intelligent, recognising the issues of the organisation that were creating frustration, irritation and exasperation that were making me limited in identifying new creative service solutions. This would have provided the foundation for clarifying what was genuinely causing my frustrations and brainstorm potential solutions that might solve the problem. Instead, I found no promising ideas that could combat this values disparity and began to create a poor track record (from the management perspective) in regards to providing quality service outputs and creative solutions. The element of risk-taking described by Proctor (2014) would have provided solutions that could have worked toward improving the social engagement quality between me and the leadership team. If I had been more risk prone and utilised the constructs of the Osborn-Parnes model, I might have been able to overcome the value block by seeking more consultation with the management team to illustrate my commitment to improving service quality for the organisation. Attaining work support from managers is positively associated with positive creative outputs (Madjar, Oldham and Pratt 2002). I believe that, in the future, by first clarifying the problem through careful and mature self-reflection, I could have identifying that the major cause of this situation was a value block which would have underpinned brainstorming potential solutions, choosing the most relevant strategy to combat the problem, and properly test its viability and feasibility and overcome further barriers (such as management resistance to horizontal relationships with subordinates) that would have provided the extrinsic motivations needed to supplement my diminishing intrinsic motivational status. Rather than following the CPS model, using careful self-investigation, I allowed a simple values difference to undermine creative thinking which was serving to give me a poor reputation as a service agent in the minds of the management team. Whilst I was unable to overcome the need for extrinsic motivation, I could have recognised this was the major problem and found solutions to attain such externally-driven recognitions for superior creative job performance. From this perspective, it would be a quality recommendation for those with value blocks to be more risk-prone and attempt to fuel better engagement between management and supervision. By identifying that the problem is not lack of motivation, but values-based blocks that underpin a de-motivational state, through the CPS model of problem-solving, it can identify strategies that will be more effective in reconciling values disparities (especially in an organisation where one is not empowered to make sweeping changes themselves) and put oneself back on track in intrinsic motivation. From a different perspective, when considering blocks to innovative thinking, I have come to realise that strategic blocks underpin inferior innovative thinking from an organisational context. This phenomenon, as iterated by Proctor (2014) is a type of thought inflexibility in which a person might believe there is only one correct answer or strategy with a heavy reliance on previous experiences without adequately assessing their implications or appropriateness. Again, in the same aforementioned workplace environment in the role of service support agent, self-reflection has found that strategic blocks dramatically stifled my innovative thinking. I have a very high level of self-efficacy and a high locus of internalised control, in which I have such confidence and faith in my abilities to succeed that I am inherently resistant to considering the opinions of others. I focus on self-regulated learning and maintain the utmost inherent conviction that I can achieve goals without support from others; a common aspect of having high self-efficacy (Maltby, Day and Macaskill 2007). I have always preferred independent work where I maintain the total responsibility for all failures or achievements. However, Stover (2004) asserts that in order to produce true innovative concepts, effective interaction and collaboration with others is critical from a social and professional context. During the end of my tenure at the company, employees were being called to discuss innovative process solutions with management leaders of these meetings as part of a new focus on trying to decentralise the organisation. We were prompted to discuss issues or concerns with the existing procedures related to different value chain divisions to come up with potential innovative solutions. I was highly resistant to these collaborative meetings and was readily dismissive of the opinion of others which caused me to be less expressive and somewhat defiant about communicating new ideas; a product of my high self-efficacy. The main objective of these subordinate-management collaborations was to identify innovations that could bring the firm competitive advantage in a market environment where growth was slowed by multiple external and internal factors. I maintained a stern belief that group innovation meetings were annoying and not practical for real solutions and maintained stern conviction that I could enhance my own job processes independently. I maintained no prosocial motivation which has been asserted by Grant and Berry (2011) as being critical for innovative thinking and production of innovative outcomes for an organisation. Strategic blocks, therefore, were strong predictors of my inability and lack of desire to identify innovations that could assist the organisation. Upon self-reflection of this resistance, I did not, at the time, realise that a lack of prosocial motivation was impacting my ability (and desire) to think innovatively. Failing to properly clarify the problem was a fundamental development need in order to make myself more flexible toward group working and collaboration. However, outside of this fundamental aspect of the CPS model dictating best practice in problem-solving, I was stereotyping employee peers based on my past experiences with inefficient co-workers and what I felt, at the time, was incompetency in work proficiency. Therefore, I applied these stereotypes to the current employee population, leading to a lack of intrinsic motivation and prosocial motivation to be more collaborative in coming up with innovative ideas to share with others. At the same time, self-reflection has identified that my rigidity in thinking had given me the biased perception that my own competency and ability to innovate independently made me superior to others. Taylor and Brown (1988) iterate that when making social comparisons, most individuals feel a sense of enhanced personal well-being when they believe they are better than others. Reflection on this defect in innovative thinking not only clarified what the problem was (in this case a sense of superiority), but redefined the problem in terms of whether it could actually be overcome and the definition of it improved. Realising that, from a development perspective, it would require a significant change in mindset and overcoming stereotypical thinking, I was able to find ideas that might combat this serious prosocial motivational problem. I attempted to utilise the Lotus Blossom brainstorming technique as a means of finding ideas to improve this deficiency. In the centre of a written diagram, I wrote the central problem which was lack of prosocial motivation and stereotyping, defined as best practice for this problem-solving technique (Michalko 1991). I then sought documenting significant themes and dimensions around the problem that highlighted constraints and what was causing such strong emotional resistance to collaboration. After brainstorming many different issues and themes, I identified that my resistance was largely borne of a lack of inherent sociability that made me reject group cooperation. It was not only that I held long-standing experiences with incompetent employees, but was a general socio-psychological issue that was serving as a barrier to innovation. Through the Lotus Blossom activity, I began searching for literature in the social sciences and psychological to combat resistance to inter-dependent group working. I learned that one major tip for improving this type of mindset was to experiment with more group work, a type of experiential learning that will break down barriers by opening oneself to more intimate workplace relationships and familiarise oneself that not all peers are incapable or incompetent. I tested this theory out in a real-world academic situation where I recruited several peers to participate in a group study session, something I would never have considered previously. By being more prosocial, I found that some of the ideas of the participant group in the study session were actually valid and could enhance learning outcomes. Through this experimentation, the team was able to innovate new study direction and I even noticed that my examination scores were far superior than if I had utilised my own rigid and self-applauded study strategies without collaboration between the team. Without the Lotus Blossom, I would never have been in touch with recurrent themes that were driving animosity toward group and team working and now I believe that I am more conducive to innovative thinking in a collaborative sense within the organisation. In this situation, it would be recommended for any individual that maintains a strategic block with stereotypical blocks impeding group work to achieve innovative outcomes to utilise the Lotus Blossom diagram. By forcing oneself to examine multiple themes and dimensions that were causing frustration or annoyance, it can provide the foundation for more flexible thinking that promotes a more prosocial attitude. For those who have such strong rigidity and stereotypical thinking, working collaboratively with others is a risk and genuine innovation and creativity cannot be developed effectively if a person is resistant to risk-taking (Yang and Pandey 2008). Risk-taking attitudes in an organisational context serves as a predictor for more radical innovative output and creativity. The Lotus Blossom diagram as a structured problem-solving technique opens the mind to different perspectives and then seek correlations once these have been documented that will identify and clarify the nature of the problem serving as an inhibitor for creative thinking. For people like myself that are a little less in touch with my inherent emotional state, this diagram is a quality structured strategy that forces a thorough examination of many different scenarios and issues driving a negative thought or strategic inflexibility. It essentially leaves no proverbial stone unturned which gives a new type of clarity and perspective that ultimately leads to better prosocial motivation and, therefore, more innovative creativity. Work organisation case study Using the same case study of the organisation providing services to customers, it should again be reiterated that this organisation was evolving from a company that did not support innovation to one that promoted it regularly. However, whilst ideas were being promoted in group meetings, very few (if any) of the ideas generated from employees were being implemented along the organisational model. This led to the perception that these meetings were primarily to (proverbially) look good on paper with no real management intention to consider and incorporate group ideas that had been presented. Amabile (1993) indicates that intrinsic motivations are enhanced when an organisation provides opportunities for autonomy and empowerment. Empowerment would have been stimulated if ideas generated in these team meetings had been implemented, however the organisation continued to mandate best practices that they felt were relevant for organisational advantages without being more flexible about using employee innovations. Managers clearly would not take the risk of empowering employees in this fashion, which created a de-motivational environment where employees were frustrated about providing further innovative ideas for the expectation that they would be criticised or utterly rejected. When employee attitudes are negative, it has a direct impact on other employees’ creative behaviours (Yang and Pandey 2008). In one situation, an employee was publicly frustrated that his ideas to innovate the customer service department had been completely dismissed. He made it a point to let everyone know, including management, that his idea was sound and produced many metrics that showed how productivity and time of response for customer needs could be improved through this idea. His idea was to give external customers access to the corporate intranet, with their own IT-supported passwords, that would allow them to place electronic orders, track invoices and view inventory levels. This was a legitimate innovative and creative concept that I recognised would also enhance productivity and customer satisfaction levels substantially with generally minimal investment by management to make this happen. It was the political environment, however, that stifled creativity and innovation not only by not implementing employee suggestions to achieve competitive advantage, but in dimensions of power distance that management wanted to maintain from low-level support employees. Managers will be resistant to change when they believe that their authority is threatened through employee empowerment (Skarlicki and Folger 1997). Internal political issues such as this impede creativity (Yang and Pandey). The management culture of this organisation was one where managers wanted to maintain control of all decision-making at the higher levels of leadership and were very vocal about criticising employees who illustrated grievances and concerns about process failures or perceived inadequacy of operational practices. Turnover in the organisation was high and the new meetings to discuss innovations often met with employees who did not show up for these discussions, leading to minor disciplinary consultations. When employees expressed that these meetings were inappropriate with management being so visibly resistant to taking ideas of employees, they were generally chastised and it was reinforced that they were expected to comply with management directives and process developments. What was occurring was the management was experiencing the phenomenon of patterning, in which they were seeing things that were, in reality, not even there (Hurson 2008). Management had grown so accustomed to their autocratic leadership style and centralised hierarchy that they had lost all flexibility and were highly resistant to experimenting with new and creative ways of doing things within the operational model. Patterns are extremely difficult to change when present as people spend their whole lifetimes nurturing them (Hurson). Employees were very diligent about offering innovative solutions to processes and brought them to management attention using rather humble communications strategies, but constantly met with rejection and minor chastisement which was clearly a product of the patterning of political superiority of the management team. Hence, de-motivation was the outcome in terms of being more participative and creative to improve organisational effectiveness and productivity. If management had been less influenced by patterned thinking and behaviour, they would have recognised that employees require effective leader-member exchanges and shared decision-making if they were to remain intrinsically motivated. Management, instead, did not provide any substantial reward or recognition for accomplishments or ideas that were legitimately sound and creative and managers were observably distant from wanting to collaborate with employees. This tended to create self-image blocks from employees that felt broken down and not generally appreciated which directly impacted their ability to provide creative outputs and maintain innovative thinking, as described by Proctor (2014) as being a major hindrance to the creative process. Managers were discounting the expertise capability of employees with considerable tenure at the company, who understood the processes and dynamics of the business. Concurrently, management was creating general job-role dissatisfaction that is directly linked to diminished creativity in employees (Zhou and George 2001). Coupling this self-image block to creativity was the hard approach to HRM undertaken by the organisation where employees were considered as resources that should be managed rationally in the same fashion as any other tangible resource to achieve maximum return on investment for the firm. This approach integrates HR policies directly with business strategies without considerable emphasis on building commitment or addressing the socio-psychological needs of employees (Armstrong 2007). This approach to HR also de-motivated employees with the high volume of regulations and policies which dictated a need for compliance rather than promoting a culture of cooperation. In one particular situation, an employee went to the HR department leader with concerns about job descriptions not relevant for the new pressures being placed on employees in a restructuring effort that consolidated job roles. This employee (and other supporters of the employee) expressed concern that new consolidated pressures were inhibiting the ability to produce quality work outcomes and satisfy the customer effectively. The employee suggested that HR develop a transactional leadership ideology for managers where performance goals were clearly defined and adequate rewards for achieving or exceeding these goals were provided. I, personally, felt that this idea was relevant and feasible considering the volume of consolidated roles that were being placed on the service division and was publicly supportive of this innovative leadership change. It took only a single day for the HR manager to come back to the service division, iterate that she had discussed this new leadership concept with line management, and that it would ultimately be rejected and that new job role demands needed compliance to satisfy new organisational objectives. In general, a complete lack of concern and empathy for employees was illustrated by the HR leader. From this scenario, my experiential learning was substantial, addressing that in organisations with slow-to-change cultures and where power distance is the norm, one must be creative in coming up with new methods of enhancing intrinsic motivation. It was clear that employees were not going to experience the satisfaction of watching their innovative ideas implemented into the model and management was not going to change its existing, patterned mindset to be more supportive of employees regardless of the volume of grievances or performance problems that such thinking was causing. Management seemed to view creativity and innovation as being a single, one-time conception and were closed-minded for creative experimentation throughout the entire business value chain. Innovation, to management, was merely a concept and not an applicable outcome that they cherished to integrate into a very autocratic and bureaucratic model of management. Management and even HR leadership did not establish a culture of innovation (though it was constantly iterated in management memos) and illustrated no contagious enthusiasm which built the foundation of self-image barriers conflicting future creative thought in the employee population. In this case study and all of the problems associated with self-image barriers, patterned management thinking and limited autonomy opportunities, clarifying the problem along the CPS model was next to impossible due to its complexities. Many employees went about the process of data-finding, gathering metrics and other support that could explain this problem and attempted again and again to redefine and clarify the problem so that management would be more receptive to making sweeping changes needed to inspire more creative thinking and innovative outputs. I, however, focused more on solution-finding along the CPS model as I already, personally, understood that the problem was management not wanting to share power that underpinned nearly all impediments to creative thinking. If the organisation had been truly interested in innovation as a means of capturing competitive advantages, rather than simply iterating the concept to please executive-level expectations for decentralisation, they would have established a transformational vision that supported a culture of innovation. Fairholm (2009) asserts that in order to gain followership and build such a culture, leaders should role model desired behaviours, foster collaborative environments and inspires others. Genuine leadership as a means of building more creative thinking is about inspiration and satisfying needs of employees rather than pushing them in a specific direction. This gives employees a sense of personal accomplishment and establishes a sense of belonging that is critical to self-esteem development and motivation (Kotter 1996). Because creativity is more potent when intrinsically motivated, the organisation was not providing an environment where one could use their full talents and fully enjoy the ability to appreciate the challenge of work. The organisational culture of power distance and non-collaboration (from a legitimate perspective) made it nearly impossible to come up with creative solutions because the depth of emotional negativity ran rampant in this business. Lack of management support, a rather hypocritical view of innovation and its relevancy to the business, dismissal of employee socio-psychological needs, and overt job pressure increases created a situation where innovation and creative thinking were impeded to a point of near irreparability. If HR had utilised the soft approach to human resources, which speaks to the minds and hearts of employees and developed policies that fostered more shared decision-making, it is likely that the de-motivational problems could have been corrected. When self-esteem problems begin to be developed in employee populations where they are afraid to express their innovative ideas for fear of being labelled incompetent or the idea not relevant, it was not surprising that the organisation failed to implement any meaningful innovative processes. Employees were receiving management reviews that further labelled their job performance as ineffectual in an environment where employees were expected to adapt to complex service-related scenarios without much management guidance about what strategies were most viable for effective service delivery. Coupling this problem was employees that were once enthused about creative thinking and offering innovative solutions and subsequently having them all rejected on a regular basis. What this situation created were coalitions with employee groups that were focused on resisting management compliance expectations in multiple areas. They were spending much of their social time in the workplace attempting to identify ideas to solve their determined problem (management inflexibility and over-demanding nature) that were non-productive. For example, they were brainstorming potential ideas about walk-outs, sabotaging customer interventions via the telephone, inputting incorrect data into the business resource planning software and other very detrimental activities. Instead of using committed behaviours toward improving the competitive advantages of the business, their creative and innovative energies were being placed into how to harm management and the organisation; after having grown so discontented and jaded that it was promoting creative ideas only in terms of malice. I learned in this situation, using elements of the CPS model, that with such significant problems with management rigidity and a culture of non-inclusion, that brainstorming activities could have been relevant for identifying potential solutions to the problem that included (for example) new job opportunities elsewhere, self-employment opportunities, and other exit strategies. Creativity, at least legitimate creativity, is not only applicable at the organisational level, but at the personal level as well. I learned that in a highly bureaucratic and inflexible organisation such as my own personal case study experience, creativity and innovation can be applied toward departure strategies that will have long-term benefit for self-improvement and career opportunities. In a somewhat amusing fashion, this organisation case study provided creativity and innovation through its lack of benevolence toward employee satisfaction that built personal confidence and removed some pre-existing self-image blocks toward seeking better employment opportunities that using assertive methodologies of personality to gain a good first impression with new employers. The management team at this case study organisation should have utilised more mentoring and coaching practices to better develop the skill-set of workers and illustrate that employees were considered as valuable contributors to organisational success. This would have underpinned a mindset in employees of commitment, dedication and satisfaction that is directly related to creative thinking enhancement (Amabile, et al. 1996). The major problem at this organisation was that employees were not deemed as being competent for genuine shared decision-making in a highly charged political environment where management demanded that they not lose their strict authoritarianism that they seemed to treasure substantially. There is little hope for an organisation to achieve competitive advantages and become innovators both internally and externally if it is resistant to change in this fashion. The problems in this organisation for satisfying the socio-psychological needs of employees greatly inhibited the ability of workers to put their cognitive and physical energies into creative thinking. The method by which organisational leaders treat their employees will dictate whether employees are happy and are dedicated to achieving high performance outcomes. Such organisational well-being is conducive to more enhanced creative thinking and results in a more fulfilling employee environment When the volume of positive emotional experiences at the workplace are in higher concentration than negative ones, employees will perceive that their work is relevant and that their organisational purpose is sufficient (Robertson Cooper 2008). Organisational well-being, which was highly over-looked as being a predictor of better innovation and creative thinking, underpinned the majority of impediments to creative thinking and the animosity that drove a lack of intrinsic motivation. Employees at the organisation could not clearly define the problem due to the complexity of what was driving their de-motivation. When there are ill-structured problems, there can be little agreement about what would be an appropriate solution (Schon 1996). This is why employees began to build malice-driven coalitions as they did not fully understand the dynamics of the problem, only their strong emotional responses to various situations that had underpinned the majority of frustrations. If these employees had been more forthright about using the Osborn-Parnes model that clarifies a problem and brainstorms viable solutions, they would likely have developed more effective and productive strategies to solve this major social problem at the organisation. Having experienced this situation first-hand, and with learning achieved in the coursework about creativity and innovation, I would have recommended that employees collaborate to identify the problem, such as using the Lotus Blossom model or even synectics to examine the plethora of complex scenarios and attitudes that were impacting de-motivational behaviours and serving as multiple blocks to creative output. However, this requires a type of cognitive competency that is learned through examining empirical studies and other theories about creativity and innovation and I am grateful for understanding these concepts which will prepare me in the future for a position within a less autocratic organisation that supports real innovation and promotes whilst rewarding creativity. References Amabile, T.M. (2013). Componential theory of creativity, in E.H. Kessler (ed.), Encyclopedia of Management Theory. London: Sage. Amabile, T., Conti, R, Coon, H., Lazenby, J. and Herron, M. (1996). 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