What is it about?
Employee creativity is often studied as the generation of novel ideas, products, and procedures that are useful for the organization. In this paper, we identify three other types of creative behaviors employees can demonstrate in the workplace, and conditions leading to these "atypical" types of employee creativity.
Featured Image
Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our conceptualization shows that employees do not always channel their creative potential into producing new products and processes for their organization. Our model shows that different individual characteristics, work experiences, and organizational environments can lead employees to demonstrate creativity in different ways. It is important to recognize these complexities because "atypical" types of employee creativity also have important implications for the employee, organization, and society.
Perspectives
I hope that this article will help organizational leaders to re-think the creative potential of their members. It was interesting to write about the tension between organizational environments and individual agency as they manifest in different types of creativity at work. I also hope this paper will help organizational researchers to think about the phenomenon of employee creativity more broadly. I hope this will foster interesting conversations both within the field of creativity and with other fields of study.
Feirong Yuan
University of Houston Victoria
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The multiple ways of behaving creatively in the workplace: A typology and model, Journal of Organizational Behavior, November 2020, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/job.2488.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
