Our first edition for 2019 sees JMO present a series of papers that explore the process of creativity through to innovation.
While it is a well-accepted management mantra that successful companies are those who are the most creative and innovative, what does this really mean and actually look like? More importantly, for many organisations – why do so many creative ideas never successfully translate into innovation?
As we will see in the nine papers presented in this issue, creativity derives from the application of knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and evaluation – and the output is innovation. While our selection of papers provides examples of innovation in both products and services, a unifying feature is creative ideas must be evaluated and developed into usable ideas. In other words, creativity really is a process that, when successful, leads to innovation. It sounds simple in management textbooks but, as the papers in this issue reveal, there are many contingencies that need to be taken into account
Our first paper is by Yung-Chang Hsiao and offers an exploration of ‘Service Innovation and Value Creation: The Critical Role of Network Relationships’. While the insight that service innovation is positively related to network relationships, and that these in turn have a positive effect on customer satisfaction, there is the interesting suggestion that network relationships actually play a mediating role between the two. It is a paper that would make interesting reading for practitioners trying to understand why that ‘great’ customer service improvement idea fails to translate into increased customer satisfaction!
It is not only the human element that needs to be considered in the ‘creativity to innovation’ process. In our second paper, Maria Bolivar-Ramos looks at the collaborative linkages and innovation performance of new ventures and how they are affected by geographical and institutional distance. Bolivar-Ramos not only explains the problem, she also offers a novel framework that actually explains how contextual factors associated with distance affect the relation between new ventures’ collaborations and their ability to develop innovations. Again, I believe that this is a paper that has practical implications and the potential to contribute beyond the academic community.
This practical aspect is very much to the fore in our third offering. Dealing with the challenge of translating good ideas into practice, Stuart Ferguson and Deborah Blackman provide us with a case study of an innovative public sector organization to reveal the ‘importance of a mandate’ and the ‘development of trust.’ These human elements in the ’creativity to innovation’ process are summed up by Fergusson and Blackman as key “managerial approaches that developed a supportive setting for innovation enabled the development of practices whereby innovation was effectively recognized, nurtured and sustained”.
Our fourth paper provides another aspect to the human element with authors Pavitra Mishra, Jyotsna Bhatnagar, Rajen Gupta and Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth exploring how work-family enrichment influences innovative work behaviour. With psychological capital and supervisor support as mediators, they found psychological capital fully mediated between bi-directional enrichment and innovative work behaviour while supervisor support was directly related to innovative work behaviour. These clear results provide for some powerful suggestions of interventions for facilitating innovative work behaviour – ah yes, yet again, results calling out for re-writing into a practitioner focus so they can be applied in the workplace!
Returning to an organizational view, Ming Kong, Haoying Xu, Aiqin Zhou and Yue Yuan offer us a view of the relationship between leadership and implicit followership theory with employee creativity. While the authors found that positive leaders’ implicit followership theory had significant positive effect on followers’ creativity, they also found that followers’ leader–member exchange with leader, intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy mediated the positive relationship between positive leaders’ implicit followership theory and followers’ creativity. Our view as to the human aspects of creativity and innovation are extended once again – in this case through the applications of social cognitive theory in leadership research, but also social exchange theory and the componential theory of creativity.
It is the ability to tie different theories and ideas together that often sees academic literature also being creative. Our sixth paper presents another nice example of this with Nan Hu, Jianlin Wu and Jibao Gus’ examination of ‘Cultural Intelligence and Employees’ Creative Performance: The Moderating Role of Team Conflict in Inter-organizational Teams’. They results reveal a positive relationship between employees’ cultural intelligence and their creative performance and the positive relationship that was strongest in higher relationship conflicts and lower task conflicts – with the theoretical and practical implications discussed in detail.
It is also a result that suggests we need to return to the role of leadership for more explanation – and this we do in our seventh paper of the issue. Here Basharat Javed, Sayyed Muhammad Mehdi Raza Naqvi, Abdul Karim Khan, Surendra Arjoon and Hafiz Habib Tayyeb explore the ‘Impact of inclusive leadership on innovative work behaviour’ through the notion of psychological safety. Once again, we find that there is no easy formula for while.
The purpose of this study is to examine inclusive leadership as a predictor of innovative work behaviour with the inclusive leadership was positively related to innovative work behaviour; it was found to be mediated by perceptions of psychological safety. The importance of perception takes a different turn in the paper presented as our eighth offering in this issue. In ‘Paternalistic Leadership and Employee Creativity, authors Yating Wang, Chaoying Tang, Stefanie Naumann and Yong Wang find that employees’ perceived job security moderated the relationship between the morality component of paternalistic leadership and employee creativity while employee organizational identification mediated the relationship between the morality component of paternalistic leadership and employee creativity.
It is a complex finding that saw me select one final paper to finish this issue with. The role of HRM was implicit in many of the papers so it seems only right that we should end with a paper that makes it explicit. In ‘Mediating links between HRM bundle and individual innovative behaviour’, Fang Liu, Irene Hau-Siu Chow, Yuanyuan Gong and Hao Wang suggest that both psychological empowerment and perceived organizational support partially mediate the relationship between HRM bundle and individual innovative behaviour – a result that points to the need to truly understand how HRM practices work together (or don’t!), to impact individual innovative behaviour.
In summary, taken together, the nine articles presented in JMOs edition 1 of 2019 provides a clear discussion as to the difference between creativity and innovation. We have seen that ‘creativity’ is the generation of new and novel ideas. This may well be the recombination of ‘old’ ideas in a new way Innovation refers to the application of an idea and, in many cases, is a collaborative process involving people both within and outside of the organization. Innovation is applied creativity where ‘success’ is often found from applying all domain of one’s life to .bring creativity and innovation to what you are currently doing as an individual, as a leader and as an organization. There has also been a very clear ‘take away for JMO in that many of the findings presented here are important real world application – yet are unlikely to be accessible there. Stay tuned to see how we can be innovative in finding a solution here (and please do contribute ideas directly to me if you think you have the answer!)
