Creativity and Leadership

Explore the role of creativity in leading people

creativity and leadership

We all have our ideas of the perfect or ideal leader, or boss, leading to situations or environments where we want to work, producing products, services, or ideas – creating - to our fullest potential.

Not surprisingly, the qualities that individuals desire in a leader exactly match what creativity and management experts state are the qualities that produce the most effective leaders.

In other words, researchers know from numerous studies that the most highly creative solutions to problems, the most motivated employees, and the highest degree of job satisfaction occurs when leaders possess something called transformational qualities.

Today more than at any other point in history, business executives working in every domain or field acknowledge the need for highly creative individuals, and environments that nurture creativity. Transformational leadership is now a buzzword not only among researchers, but also among business leaders.

In 2010, IBM released its results from a survey of more than 1,500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide. Overwhelmingly, these CEOs cited an increasingly complex, volatile world and business environments that absolutely demand creative leadership.

Qualities of Effective Leaders

  • This leader motivates instead of demands. He or she constantly communicates goals and visions, and expectations for excellence and high achievement.
  • This leader actively participates with those he or she is leading, forming strong, positive relationships.
  • This boss or leader encourages unconventional or out-of-the-box thinking, holding back judgment for even the most unorthodox suggestions. Individuals are encouraged to question their own assumptions, as well as the leader’s ideas and assumptions without fear of recriminations.

About 60% of those polled gave creativity the top spot for the most important leadership quality. These leaders placed creativity above rigor, management discipline and integrity for success in today’s world.

Specifically, CEOs stated the need for transformational leaders. Transformation, they explained, means finding innovative ways of managing a company’s strategy and vision, people, finances, and overall business structure.
In “Transformational Leadership and Dimensions of Creativity: Motivating Idea Generation in Computer-Mediated Groups,” researcher John J. Sosik and colleagues defined transformational leadership behaviors as promoting the following:

(a) intellectual stimulation: questioning of assumptions, reframing of problems, and thinking about ideas and concepts using novel approaches;
(b) individualized consideration: appreciating and integrating different needs and viewpoints of members within a group; and
(c) inspirational motivation: inspiring group members to elevate their goals and needs. (link to these concepts below.)

“Transformational leaders use intellectual stimulation, promote consideration of different viewpoints, and inspire collective action to promote group creativity,” according to the article, appearing in a 1998 Creativity Research Journal.

Sosik, PhD, a management and organization professor and researcher from Pennsylvania State University at Great Valley, stated that these transformational behaviors correlated with highly creative behaviors observed in more than 35 studies.

Following Sosik’s study two years later, and also appearing in the Creativity Research Journal, research by Dong I. Jung extended the research of Sosik.

Jung explains in “Transformational and Transactional Leadership and Their Effects on Creativity in Groups,” that to understand transformational leadership, it must be compared to transactional leadership. His study looking at the brainstorming activities on group members, compared groups under both transformational and transactional types of leadership.

Transactional leadership

Transactional leadership is based on a more traditional management style. Leaders following a transactional approach typically dole out rewards in exchange for certain levels of performance. Higher performance means more positive reinforcement.

In transactional leadership situations, the leader sets the objectives, and measures performance and results against the achievement of these objectives.

Subordinates are not encouraged to enhance their creativity by challenging the status quo or trying out creative solutions to problems, according to Jung. Instead, leaders monitor performance based on pre-assigned standards, and the leader only intervenes when the follower deviates from those standards.

In Jung’s study, groups performed significantly less creatively under transactional leadership than under transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership

Transformational leaders proactively encourage followers or subordinates to take risks, deviating from conventional or traditional approaches to problem solving. As Sosik, Jung also defines this type of leadership as having the following three components:

Intellectual stimulation

The way that transactional leaders encourage out-of-box thinking is by creating an intellectually stimulating environment. This means that individuals aren’t afraid of experimenting with innovative approaches to problem solving. They don’t fear ridicule, punishment, or recrimination.

Questioning long-held beliefs, values, and traditions are an important aspect of intellectual stimulation. The leader, by asking the right questions, making appropriate, nonjudgmental statements, and modeling open-minded behaviors, encourages this type of intellectual questioning.

Individualized consideration

Jung states that research supports the fact that more creative outcomes result when individuals know that the leader genuinely cares for and respects them. Jung stated: “Transformational leadership involves active and emotional relationships between leaders and followers.”

He wrote that studies show that democratic, considerate, and participative leader behaviors are highly correlated with subordinate creativity.

his also means promoting an environment where others in the group or on a team are required to respect and listen to their colleagues unique perspectives in a nonjudgmental, open-minded manner.

Inspirational motivation

Jung refers to research by Harvard University’s Teresa M. Amabile, a highly respected and widely cited creativity expert, researcher, and psychology PhD. Amabile has researched and written extensively on motivation within organizations.

She writes in her research that regardless of individuals’ creative abilities or talents, if they aren’t motivated to produce, these skills are never actualized. (See Creativity in Business). She writes that intrinsically motivated employees generate more creativity than extrinsically motivated employees.

Leaders are the key to nurturing intrinsic motivation. By inspiring individuals to bond as a team, developing their interests and self-concepts cohesively, the individuals increase their intrinsic motivation. Leaders also can change an environment to promote intrinsic motivation.

Changing environments means encouraging nontraditional approaches to problem solving, encouraging a collaborative approach, and refraining from completely controlling the goal-setting and goal-achieving process. Employees who feel as if they integral to the future direction of the company will exhibit more innovation and novel outputs than those simply following a set of standards established by management or executives.

Amabile argues that only promising extrinsic rewards, such as higher paychecks, actually deter individuals from developing the most creative outcomes. However, bonuses or rewards for meeting or exceeding expectations correlate more positively with intrinsic motivation.

Dialogue

Experts who study creativity and leadership also stress the importance of healthy, productive dialogue among employees, and between employees and the leadership.

In “Leadership As Creativity: Finding the Opportunity Hidden Within Decision Making and Dialogue,” appearing on the National Endowment for the Arts website, the value of dialogue is described.

Author John M. McCann states that when decisions are made collaboratively, they are better than those made individually.

The power of teamwork can’t be emphasized enough, but getting there is the challenge.

So where, McCann asks, does “creativity, ambiguity, tension, and decisiveness come together in healthy environment that regards the integrity of the individual and the value of the organization equally? This is accomplished only through dialogue.”

If you are interested in studying how creativity affects leadership, and the health of today’s businesses, consider a career that combines creativity and psychological studies. Many career options are available, but most require a degree, or a strong background in psychology. The following fields are possibilities for study in this area: Cognitive Psychology, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Social Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Media Psychology.

Contact schools for more information on a bachelor’s, master’s or PhD programs in psychology.

How CEOs View Creative Leaders

According to the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study: Creativity Selected as Most Crucial Factor for Future Success, 1500 CEOs listed the following traits of creative leaders:

  • Are able to and expect to experiment and make more business model changes to accomplish their strategies.
  • Are able to invite disruptive innovation, meaning they encourage others to take risks and stray from traditional approaches.
  • Are able to consider previously unheard-of-ways to drastically change the organization or enterprise, which nurtures innovation.
  • Are able to live comfortably with ambiguity.
  • Are able to score high on innovation.
  • Are able to invent new business models based on drastically different assumptions.
  • Are able to encourage decisions that question the status quo.

Creative genius

A noun used in a variety of contexts, genius means different things depending on the context in which it’s used.

In academic contexts, genius usually implies a person with a high IQ. But another common usage, and much less defined, is when individuals use the phrase creative genius.

Research done over the past few decades shows that high IQs do not highly correlate with creativity. In fact, some experts point out that really high IQs probably inhibit or prevent high levels of creativity. And individuals with average IQs can be highly creative.

So who is a creative genius? What distinguishes a creative person from a creative genius?

Psychologist and creativity researcher Dean Keith Simonton has devoted a significant amount of his career in studying the concept of creative genius. He has written books on the subject, journal articles, essays, and chapters of sourcebooks devoted to the psychology of creativity.

In “The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity,” Simonton wrote a chapter called Creativity in Highly Eminent Individuals. He defines creative genius as follows:

Creative geniuses become highly eminent because they have contributed at least one product that is widely viewed as a masterwork in an established domain of creative achievement.

He wrote that the magnitude of their creative contributions last years, even centuries. Think Shakespeare, Da Vinci, Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Beethoven, Woolf, Bergman, Picasso, and McCartney.

If you’re wondering if someone falls within this realm of creative genius, simply go to google.com and type in the name. If thousands of Internet sites come up, and you get a Wikipedia entry, that person has passed the first round to enter history as a creative genius, Simonton wrote.

If a link goes directly to a site specifically dedicated to that person, chances are even higher that historians document them as creative geniuses.

In another chapter for “The Routledge Companion to Creativity,” Simonton compared creative geniuses to extraordinary leaders. Creative geniuses influence and affect culture through “products,” such as books, poems, paintings, or compositions.

In the same way, extraordinary leaders, such as presidents, lawmakers and military leaders exert exceptional influence on their cultures through policies, programs, reforms, initiatives, strategies, tactics, and laws - also considered “products.”

The impact of both creators and leaders is seen in the products they produce.

In summary, Simonton states that “genius is defined by excellence in achievements, achievements that may range from breakthrough symphonies to battlefield victories – and any other manner of exerting impact through products.”