Encouraging creativity while retaining standards
Dr Giles Hirst
By Dr Giles Hirst
Most organisations are keenly aware that they need to foster innovative behaviour. It is what ultimately enables them to stay ahead of the game. At the same time, however, organisations rely on rules, regulations and reporting procedures to provide structure and control. These same practices stifle and impede innovative behaviour.
How do you reconcile the inevitable tension between management controls - the bureaucratic systems essential for ensuring that the organisation works efficiently and maintains consistent standards - and the freedom needed to allow staff to express their creative instincts?
In short, to understand individual creativity at work you have to examine how individuals interact with their workplace.
Creative performance at work is a function of the relationship between the individual and their context. There are two key aspects of the bureaucratic context:
1. The degree to which an organisation sets down rules, process and procedures (what is known as formalisation).
2. How decision-making power is distributed across the organisation as a whole and within teams.
Centralised decision-making reduces opportunities for individuals to contribute original thoughts or novel views - the leader essentially makes key decisions. Decentralised participative decision-making, by contrast, encourages individuals to contribute and participate in decisions and gives them scope to express their views.
One might initially assume bureaucracy to be the direct opposite of creativity, in practice the picture is far less clear-cut.
How far bureaucracy constrains or allows leeway for innovative behaviours very much depends on the individual. The same set of circumstances or team environment will not necessarily impact everyone in the same way.
Some individuals are, by nature, motivated to learn. This type of disposition means they will invest time and effort in developing competence and mastering tasks, and become intrinsically interested in the task itself. This then encourages them to develop creative solutions.
Then there are those with an ‘avoid’ orientation, who are driven first and foremost by the desire not to be judged unfavourably. They’re predisposed to be less creative, because creativity inherently involves uncertainty and risk of failure.
For individual creativity to flourish, clearly you need to give people the freedom to be creative. But this should not simply be a laissez-faire approach of passively removing constraints and leaving people to their own devices. In fact, if an individual tends to avoid taking on challenging activities, then stripping away formal steps that direct their actions can make them even less creative.
The key is to develop people’s interest in learning, and provide them with both opportunities to participate and take a serious and critical eye to the time and formal requirements imposed by managerial controls.
Each step in an approval process and each new piece of data required reduces productivity and, as such, has to justify its worth either in accountability or business returns. This challenge of productivity is not just a concern for organisations but a national economic imperative.
Dr Giles Hirst is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at Monash University.