Contents
As a rule, employees with organizational and leadership skills are appointed as leaders of working groups or teams. At the same time, creativity is considered much less important. However, a new study shows that only creative leaders can create a creative environment around them.
Lei Huang, Associate Professor of Management at the College of Business at Auburn University (USA), conducted a study with colleagues in which they interviewed 106 workgroup leaders at a major US technology corporation. The researchers were interested in how confident they were in their creative abilities (based on the survey, the so-called CCB coefficient was calculated).
Pass the tests
- Is it time to change jobs?
- What is your main talent at work?
Then 544 ordinary members of the working groups were interviewed (on average, each of them worked in the company for about four years). It turned out that employees who worked in a group led by a person with a high TCB score were themselves more likely to be creative, for example, devoting a lot of time to finding information that could help with new ideas. They also believed that high TCB leaders encouraged the creativity of their subordinates. These positive effects were even stronger if the team leader maintained a good relationship with subordinates. At the same time, the bosses with high TCB more often said that their subordinates are a source of creative ideas for them.
In general, the analysis of the data has shown the invalidity of the assumptions that superiors, convinced of their creative abilities, will reject the creative ideas of subordinates because of competition or because of higher standards. On the contrary, creative leaders are generally less conservative, non-conformist and open to new ideas, which allows them to be “on the same wavelength” with creative subordinates.
Read more:
- How to develop creativity? 14 curious ways
The authors of the study emphasize that self-confidence in one’s creative abilities can be developed, and suggest that many organizations should consider appropriate training for team leaders.
However, there are other ways to stimulate the creativity of employees working in groups. An experiment conducted in 2007 showed that if the composition of work teams remains the same for a long time, colleagues get used to each other and feel more comfortable and, it seems to them, become more creative. However, in the experiment, new teams made up of people who had not previously worked with each other generated more ideas on a given topic (how to increase the flow of tourists to the San Francisco Bay Area), in addition, the experts rated their ideas higher.
Подробнее см. L. Huang et al. «I can do it, so can you: The role of leader creative self-efficacy in facilitating follower creativity», Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2016, vol. 132.