Creativity, Organizational Knowledge, and the Power of Dreams
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Creativity, Organizational Knowledge, and the Power of Dreams Francesco Schiavone & Manuel Villasalero
Received: 9 March 2013 / Accepted: 31 May 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract This study addresses the question of how dreams might improve organizational creativity in real-world situations. Both Freudian and Jungian perspectives are considered in a study that seeks to explore whether the personal and the collective unconscious can be put to the service of high-tech companies. A multiple case study methodology based on 10 projects from two companies shed light on the role that intrinsic motivation (personal unconscious) and organizational ideals (collective unconscious) play in the dreaming activity of the project managers and the resulting overall creativity outcomes of the corresponding projects. With respect to the management of the personal unconscious, the findings indicate that intrinsic motivation increases the emotional tone of dreams, which in turn, contributes to overall project creativity. A more intrinsically motivated project manager is an emotional dreamer which is able to contribute to the project creativity with innovative solutions derived from his/her dreams. With regard to the management of the collective unconscious, the study shows that project managers organize their project members around some organizational ideals (hierarchy, group, team, and clan) that may fuel or hamper project creativity outcomes, thus conditioning the use of the collective unconscious. Specifically, the project managers in charge of teams and clans are more creative and emotional dreamers than those in charge of hierarchies and groups. This study contributes to the knowledge of the role that elusive antecedents, such as dreams, might play in organizational creativity, innovation, and change. Instead of discussing about dreams in an abstract manner, the study focuses on specific mechanisms (intrinsic motivation and organizational ideals) under the control of senior managers. Keywords Dreams . Organizational creativity . Knowledge . Unconscious . Ego ideal F. Schiavone (*) Department of Business Studies, Faculty of Economics, Parthenope University, Naples, Italy e-mail: [email protected] F. Schiavone ESG Management School, Paris, France M. Villasalero Department of Business Administration, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Ciudad Real, Spain
J Knowl Econ
Introduction The subject of organizational creativity is a central stream of research within the fields of both innovation management (Alves et al. 2007; Bharadwaj and Menon 2000) and organizational behavior (e.g., Amabile et al. 1996; Zhou and George 2001). Organizational creativity refers to “the creation of a valuable, useful new product, service, idea, procedure, or process by individuals working together in a complex social system” (Woodman et al. 1993, p. 293). Innovation and change are processes strongly rooted in creativity (Ford and Ogilvie 1996). Entrepreneurs can change market equilibriums and innovate by their capabilit
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