Fostering Creative Organizations: Antecedents, Processes, and Consequences of Individual and Team Creativity

Creativity, defined as the ability or process to generate novel and useful ideas, is the key source of organizational and social innovation, especially in the Industry 4.0 era. Artificial Intelligence-driven machines will replace humans for many processes in coming years. Where such machines use existing Big Data to predict new phenomena, humans use their imagination to generate original, innovative ideas. As such, creativity is a key differentiator of mind from machine, a core driver of our uniqueness in an increasingly automated world. Indeed, creativity is required for success in every domain of human endeavor: business, education, arts, politics, public administration, and others. Thus, an important question is how best to improve the creativity of employees, entrepreneurs, students, teachers, scientists, engineers, artists, designers, and others, to collectively enhance our innovativeness, enjoyment, and global living standards.

Given its critical and pivotal role, creativity has attracted scholarly interest from disciplines including psychology, business, management, neuroscience, arts, computer science, and mathematics. However, despite theory and application-focused studies, there are significant knowledge gaps in what constitutes the antecedents, processes, and consequences of creativity. In particular, while an extant body of work has focused on creativity’s dispositional and situational predictors, more research needs to be conducted on the cultural, moral, ethical, relational, and behavioral factors that boost or hamper individual and team creativity in organizational settings. Moreover, creativity’s consequences have remained largely unexplored. Recent work has highlighted that greater creativity is associated with lower ethicality and poorer spousal relationships. These findings raise the question of how best to foster creative organizations while simultaneously ensuring creativity, ethicality, and relationship integrity. There is also a critical need for more research into how to make creative ideas work—from idea-generation to implementation. In short, we need more research on the ethical, relational, and other consequences of individual, and team, creativity as well as the complex processes that underpin creativity.

The goal of this Research Topic is to provide a forum to discuss new ideas and recent developments in individual and team creativity, to enable people to think and behave creatively while also promoting ethical, relationally enriching action, to promote the best possible outcomes. Overall, we wish to gain a more comprehensive understanding of individual and team creativity for organizational and social innovation and improvement.

The proposed Research Topic welcomes manuscripts on areas including but not limited to:
• How best to conceptualize creativity
• The creative process: from idea generation to implementation
• Idea originator and user perspectives on idea evaluation
• Behavioral predictors of creativity
• Moral and ethical predictors and consequences of individual and team creativity
• Relational predictors and consequences of individual and team creativity
• Cultural perspectives on individual and team creativity
• Bright and dark sides of highly creative people
• Consumption experience and consequences of creative or innovative products
• Effective creativity training and education for employees
• Teaching creative thinking to adults across the age span
• Profiles of team creativity versus individual creativity
• Accurate prediction and identification of creativity in employees and others
• Costs and benefits of human creativity versus Artificial Intelligence