Creativity and the Role of the Leader

Teresa M. Amabile; Mukti  Khaire

Article | Harvard Business Review | October 2008

Creativity and the Role of the Leader

Abstract

In today's innovation-driven economy, understanding how to generate great ideas has become an urgent managerial priority. Suddenly, the spotlight has turned on the academics who've studied creativity for decades. How relevant is their research to the practical challenges leaders face? To connect theory and practice, Harvard Business School professors Amabile and Khaire convened a two-day colloquium of leading creativity scholars and executives from companies such as Google, IDEO, Novartis, Intuit, and E Ink. In this article, the authors present highlights of the research presented and the discussion of its implications. At the event, a new leadership agenda began to take shape, one rooted in the awareness that you can't manage creativity - you can only manage for creativity. A number of themes emerged: The leader's job is not to be the source of ideas but to encourage and champion ideas. Leaders must tap the imagination of employees at all ranks and ask inspiring questions. They also need to help their organizations incorporate diverse perspectives, which spur creative insights, and facilitate creative collaboration by, for instance, harnessing new technologies. The participants shared tactics for enabling discoveries, as well as thoughts on how to bring process to bear on creativity without straitjacketing it. They pointed out that process management isn't appropriate in all stages of creative work; leaders should apply it thoughtfully and manage the handoff from idea generators to commercializers deftly. The discussion also examined the need to clear paths through bureaucracy, weed out weak ideas, and maximize the organization's learning from failure. Though points of view varied, the theories and frameworks explored advance the understanding of creativity in business and offer executives a playbook for increasing innovation.

Keywords: Leadership; Commercialization; Managerial Roles; Creativity; Innovation and Management; Social and Collaborative Networks; Diversity;

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Citation:

Amabile, Teresa M., and Mukti Khaire. "Creativity and the Role of the Leader." Harvard Business Review 86, no. 10 (October 2008).

Book Abstract: Rapid technological change, global competition, and economic uncertainty have all contributed to organizations seeking to improve creativity and innovation. Researchers and businesses want to know what factors facilitate or inhibit creativity in a variety of organizational settings. Individual Creativity in the Workplace identifies those factors, including what motivational and cognitive factors influence individual creativity, as well as the contextual factors that impact creativity such as teams and leadership. The book takes research findings out of the lab and provides examples of these findings put to use in real world organizations.

Article | Academy of Management Journal | August 2018

Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-Clearing Across Difficult Terrain

Colin M. Fisher, Julianna Pillemer and Teresa M. Amabile

How do teams working on complex projects get the help they need? Our qualitative investigation of the help provided to project teams at a prominent design firm revealed two distinct helping processes, both characterized by deep, sustained engagement that far exceeds the brief interactions described in the helping literature. Such deep help consisted of (1) guiding a team through a difficult juncture by working with its members in several prolonged, tightly clustered sessions, or (2) path-clearing by helping a team address a persistent deficit via briefer, intermittent sessions throughout a project's life. We present a model theorizing these processes, which has two noteworthy features. First, it emphasizes the socially constructed nature of helping behavior. That is, the parties must establish and maintain a helping frame for their interaction, especially when help-givers are high-status external leaders. Second, the model specifies that the rhythms of deep help—the duration and temporal patterns of giver-receiver interactions—are resource-allocation decisions that also contribute to the social meaning of help. These findings illuminate the theoretical and practical overlap between helping and external leadership in knowledge-intensive project work as well as the role of temporality in the helping process.

Keywords: helping; rhythm; prosocial behavior; external team leadership; social construction; time; qualitative methods; field research; Groups and Teams; Projects; Behavior; Leadership; Social and Collaborative Networks;

Citation:

Fisher, Colin M., Julianna Pillemer, and Teresa M. Amabile. "Deep Help in Complex Project Work: Guiding and Path-Clearing Across Difficult Terrain." Academy of Management Journal 61, no. 4 (August 2018): 1524–1553. View Details

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