Super Leadership :: Business, Creative Culture

Idea Generation and Creative Potential The global competitive forces are compelling organizations to develop highly innovative and creative environment, where idea generation is encouraged and serves as a live blood for organizational survival by creating a strong creative culture. Because of this pressure on organization to be more creative, they are turning towards idea generation and developing creative potential of employees. Idea generation is one of the coherent phases of the creative process (Kanter, 1988); (West & Farr, 1989). Similarly, it is argued that the creativity is nothing else but the generation of novel and useful ideas (Amabile T. , 1988). Likewise, it is commented that various scientists characterize creativity as a source of generating novel or useful ideas by individuals or teams members. This manifests that idea generation and creativity are two sides of a same coin (Greenberg & Baron, 2003). Moreover, creativity is a vital characteristic related to life that we act upon in daily routine. It covers a problem at workplace that become pleasure or an imagination that becomes a reality in a hi-tech world (Bonnardel, 1999). Creativity and productivity are highly correlated due to which firms strongly believe in the effects creativity has on better performance and due to this conviction, they spends a lot of money on creativity in firms (Dennard, 2000). However, in order to foster the idea generation and creative potential of employee in the organization are compelled to identify the underlying elements. For creating such environment, various factors have been identified & explored by the scholars (West M. A., Sparkling fountains or stagant ponds: An integrative model of creativity and innovation implementation in work groups, 2002a); (West M. A., Ideas are ten a penny: its team implementation not idea generation that count, 2002b); (Mumford, 2003); (Gilson & Shalley, 2004); (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005); (Shin & Zhou, 2003), and (Cheng, 1994). More recently, in a study, it is substantiated the importance of interpersonal character of idea generation as highlighted in recent literature on creativity. Furthermore, it is argued that the creation of ideas instigates the interaction between the individual and its social environment (Zhou, 2008). For idea generation, the broader (organizational) context needs to stimulate interpersonal contacts as much as possible. An open, helpful, somewhat informal culture, in which people can easily call on others, facilitates formal and informal social connections and idea generation. Creative Culture Everybody has a role to play as citizens and consumers, culture and creativity, at the same time, help deliver new, more sustainable ways of living and working.