Organizational creativity and knowledge collecting: An empirical analysis

Grounding on the interactionist perspective proposed by Woodman, Sawyer, and Griffin (1993), this paper conceives organizational creativity as a complex concept whose investigation requires the understanding of the process, the product, the person, and the situation. Accordingly, this work attempts to enrich the understanding of how organizational creativity can be fostered by offering a framework which combines (inter-)individual-level learning (collecting knowledge from others), information sharing (through ICT infrastructures), and contextual factors (perceived top management support). The empirical analysis draws on a sample of 362 employees from five Multinational Corporations’ subsidiaries and shows that individuals’ orientation toward learning from others, the extent to which they use ICT for fostering information sharing within the firm, and a strong top management support significantly enhance organizational creativity. However, a heavy ICT use may weaken the relationship between learning from others and organizational creativity. Based on these results, the paper contributes to the literature on organizational creativity by confirming the importance of providing a holistic view of the phenomenon, consistently with its inherent complexity. In so doing, it suggests organizations and their managers to simultaneously pay attention to individual- and situational-factors when planning how to foster their firms’ creativity, as both of them are found to play a critical role on firms’ success and competitiveness.