Apply the KEYS model by Amabile in the article Motivating Creativity in Organizations? p. 48 Table 1.? Assess your organization’s environment on the following dimensions: Supervisor

Motivating Creativity in Organizations: O N DOING WHAT YOU LOVE

AND LOVING WHAT You Do

Teresa M. Amabile

A rthur Schawlow, winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1981, was once asked what, in his opinion, made the difference between highly creative and less creative scientists. He replied, "The labor of love aspect is important. The most successful scientists often are not the

most talented. But they are the ones who are impelled by curiosity. They've got to know what the answer is."' Schawlow's insights about scientific creativity highlight the Importance of intrinsic motivation: the motivation to work on some- thing because it is interesting, involving, exciting, satisfying, or personally chal- lenging. There is abundant evidence that people will be most creative when they are primarily intrinsically motivated, rather than extrinsically motivated by expected evaluation, surveillance, competition with peers, dictates from supe- riors, or the promise of rewards.^

Interestingly, this Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity applies not only to scientific creativity, but to business creativity as well. Often, financial success is closely tied to a passion for the work itself. Michael Jordan, who by the mid-1990s was the most financially successful basketball player in history, insisted on a "love of the game" clause in his contract—securing for him the right to play in "pick-up" games whenever he wished. Robert Carr, a primary developer of the first pen computer, was captivated by the opportunity to do something spectacular that had never been done before. When entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan described the idea to him, Carr reacted with intense excitement: "Jerry, it's not a question of whether I want to do this. I have to do this. This is important. This is profound. . . . It's not very often that opportunities like this come along—something really big, a chance to really make a difference. Maybe once a decade or so. 1 think you've got one here."*

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Motivating Creativity in Organizations

When Steve Wozniak invented the micro-computer, he demonstrated creativity in new product development; for all intents and purposes, such a thing had not existed before. When Walt Disney created Disneyland, he demonstrated creativity in new service development; he essentially Invented a new form of entertainment. Although most people think of creativity in business as limited to the creation of something new to sell, there are other forms as well. When Fred Smith developed the concept for Federal Express, he certainly was not inventing a new service or a new product; humans had heen delivering messages and packages to each other for thousands of years. In this instance, the creativity resided in the system for delivery: a hub system, where all packages were flown to Memphis on the same day, sorted, and distributed for air delivery the next day. Creativity exists in less famous, more humble, examples as well: the ad campaign that revitalizes a dying brand, or the product line extension that cap- tures additional market share.

At its heart, creativity is simply the production of novel, appropriate ideas in any realm of human activity, from science, to the arts, to education, to busi- ness, to everyday life. The ideas must be novel—different from what's been done before—but they can't be simply bizarre; they must be appropriate to the prob- lem or opportunity presented. Creativity is the first step in innovation, which is the successful implementation of those novel, appropriate ideas. And innovation is absolutely vital for long-term corporate success. Because the business world is seldom static, and because the pace of change appears to be rapidly accelerating, no firm that continues to deliver the same products and services in the same way can long survive. By contrast, firms that prepare for the future by imple- menting new ideas oriented toward this changing world are likely to thrive.*

Individual Creativity

To some extent, intrinsic motivation resides in a person's own personal- ity.̂ Some people are more strongly driven than others by the enjoyment and sense of challenge in their work. For example, Pablo Casals was driven by pas- sion for the cello from the day he first heard the instrument played: "I had never heard such a beautiful sound before. A radiance filled me. I said, 'Father, that is the most wonderful instrument I have ever heard. That is what I want to play.'"^ The novelist John Irving, in explaining his motivation to write for up to 14 hours in a single day, said, "The unspoken factor is love. The reason I can work so hard at my writing is that it's not work for me."^

Although part of intrinsic motivation depends on personality, my stu- dents, colleagues, and I have discovered in 20 years of research that a person's social environment can have a significant effect on that person's level of intrinsic motivation at any point in time; the level of intrinsic motivation can, in turn, have a significant effect on that person's creativity. Einstein described the damp- ening effect of a militaristic classroom environment on his own intrinsic motiva- tion when he said, "This coercion had such a deterring effect upon me that, after

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Motivating Creativity in Organizations

I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful for an entire year."** He later concluded, "It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."^

Much of the evidence on this connection between the social environ- ment, intrinsic motivation, and creativity comes from controlled laboratory experiments.'° In one such study, for example, college students were presented with a simple artistic creativity task—making a paper collage with a standard set of materials.'' Half of the students were randomly assigned to a condition where they were offered a reward (money) for making the collage, and half were sim- ply given the collage activity to do. In addition, half within each group were given a choice; they were asked whether they would agree to make the collage in order to get the money (in the choice/reward condition), or they were simply asked whether they wanted to make the collage (in the choice/non-reward con- dition). Students in the no-choice condition were not offered any choice in the matter; those in the no-choice/reward condition were simply presented with the reward as a bonus, and those in the no-choice/non-reward condition were sim- ply given the collage task.

The results were quite clear and striking. The students who had essen- tially made a contract to do the activity in order to get the reward (choice/ reward condition) exhibited strikingly lower levels of creativity in their collages than the other three groups. The "means-end" work environment—"Do this task as a means to the end of getting this reward"—appears to have undermined their creativity. In contrast, however, those students who received the reward as a bonus showed no diminishment in creativity. In fact, their creativity was higher than those of the other groups. And, in keeping with the Intrinsic Motivation Principle of Creativity, students' creativity was correlated with their reported interest in the collage activity; the more interested they were, the more creative their collages were judged by art experts. Thus, it was not the fact of reward, but the perception of reward (resulting from the way in which it was presented) that made the difference.

Another experiment addressed the Intrinsic Motivation hypothesis even more directly. In this study, young creative writers were asked to fill out a short questionnaire before writing a poem.'^ The questionnaire was designed to have them focus on either their intrinsic reasons for being a writer {such as getting a lot of pleasure out of something good that you have written) or their extrinsic reasons for being a writer (such as getting rich and famous). (Participants in a control condition filled out an unrelated, non-motivational questionnaire.) They then wrote poems, which were later judged by experts in creative writing. The writers in the intrinsic condition and the control condition wrote poems that were judged as quite creative, on average. However, those who had focused for just a few minutes on the extrinsic motivations for their work wrote poems thai were significantly less creative.

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Motivating O«ativfty in Organizations

The ComponentialTheory of Individual Creativity

According to conventional wisdom, creativity is something done by cre- ative people. Even creativity researchers, for several decades, seemed to guide their work by this principle, focusing predominantly on individual differences: What are creative people like, and how are they different from most people in the world? Although this person-centered approach yielded some important findings about the backgrounds, personality traits, and work styles of outstand- ingly creative people,'* it was both limited and limiting. It offered little to practi- tioners concerned with helping people to become more creative in their work, and it virtually ignored the role of the social environment in creativity and inno- vation. In contrast to the traditional approach, the Componential Theory of Cre- ativity assumes that all humans with normal capacities are able to produce at least moderately creative work in some domain, some of the time—and that the social environment (the work environment) can influence both the level and the frequency of creative behavior.

The theory includes three major components of individual (or small team) creativity, each of which is necessary for creativity in any given domain: expertise, creative-thinking skill, and intrinsic task motivation (see Figure 1).'* The componential theory suggests that creativity is most likely to occur when people's skills overlap with their strongest intrinsic interests—their deepest pas- sions—and that creativity will be higher, the higher the level of each of the three components. This is the "creativity intersection" depicted in Figure 1.

Expertise Expertise is the foundation for all creative work. It can be viewed as the

set of cognitive pathways that may be followed for solving a given problem or doing a given task—the problem solver's "network of possible wanderings."'^ The expertise component includes memory for factual knowledge, technical proficiency, and special talents in the target work domain—such as expertise in gene splicing, or in computer simulation, or in strategic management. For example, a high-tech engineer's expertise includes his innate talent for imagin- ing and thinking about complex engineering problems, as well as focusing in on the important aspects of those problems; his factual knowledge about electron- ics; his familiarity with past work and current developments in high-tech engi- neering; and the technical skills he has acquired in designing, carrying out, and interpreting research.

Creative Thinking

This component provides that "something extra" of creative perform- ance.'^ Assuming that a person has some incentive to perform an activity, per- formance will be "technically good" or "adequate" or "acceptable" if the requisite expertise is in place. However, even with expertise at an extraordinarily high level, the person will not produce creative work if creative thinking skills are

•42 CALIFORNIA M A N A G E M E N T REVIEW V O L 40, N O . 1 FALL 1997

Motivating Creativity in Organizations

F IGURE I . 3 Component Model of Creativity

Creativity Skills

Task Motivation

lacking. These skills include a cognitive style favorable to taking new perspec- tives on problems, an application of techniques (or "heuristics") for the explo- ration of new cognitive pathways, and a working style conducive to persistent, energetic pursuit of one's work.

Creative thinking depends to some extent on personality characteristics related to independence, self-discipline, orientation toward risk-taking, tolerance for ambiguity, perseverance in the face of frustration, and a relative lack of con- cern for social approval.'^ However, creativity skills can be increased by the learning and practice of techniques to improve cognitive flexibility and intellec- tual independence.

An engineer's arsenal of creativity skills might include his ability to break out of a pre-conceived perception or expectation when examining testing

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Motivating Creartivity in Organizations

results, his tolerance for ambiguity in the process of deciding on the appropriate interpretation for puzzling data, his ability to suspend judgment as he considers different approaches, and his ability to break out of strict algorithms for attack- ing a problem. He might also have learned to employ some of the creativity heuristics described by theorists: "When all else fails, try something counterintu- itive;"'** or "Make the familiar strange."''* Finally, if he is productively creative, his work style is probably marked by an ability to concentrate effort for long periods of time-̂ ° and an ability to abandon unproductive strategies, temporarily putting aside stubborn problems.^'

Intrinsic Task Motivation

Although the two skill components determine what a person is capable of doing in a given domain, it is the task motivation component that determines what that person actually will do. Motivation can be either intrinsic (driven by deep interest and involvement in the work, by curiosity, enjoyment, or a per- sonal sense of challenge) or extrinsic (driven by the desire to attain some goal that is apart from the work itself —such as achieving a promised reward or meeting a deadline or winning a competition). Although combinations of intrin- sic and extrinsic motivation are common, one is likely to be primary for a given person doing a given task. A number of studies have shown that a primarily intrinsic motivation will be more conducive to creativity than a primarily extrin- sic motivation.

Task motivation makes the difference between what an engineer can do and what he will do. The former depends on his levels of expertise and creative thinking skills. But it is his task motivation that determines the extent to which he will fully engage his expertise and creative thinking skills in the service of creative performance. To some extent, a high degree of intrinsic motivation can even make up for a deficiency of expertise or creative thinking skills. A highly intrinsically motivated person is likely to draw skills from other domains, or apply great effort to acquiring necessary skills in the target domain,^^

Although a person's development of expertise and practice of creative thinking skills can be influenced to some extent by the social environment, the strongest and most direct influence of the environment is probably on motiva- tion. Certainly, a person starts out with a level of intrinsic motivation that depends on his or her basic enjoyment of the work. But experiments like those described earlier have shown how a person's basic motivational orientation for a task, and resulting creativity on that task, can be influenced by even momentary alterations in the work environment. For example, an engineer may be highly intrinsically motivated to undertake a new project of his own design, but he may be singularly uninterested in a project handed to him by the direaor of the lab.

Motivational Synergy

The prevailing psychological model of the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation suggests an antagonism: as extrinsic motivation for an

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activity increases, intrinsic motivation must decrease.^^ But there is considerable evidence from field research that, under certain conditions, certain forms of extrinsic motivation may combine synergistically with intrinsic motivation, enhancing (or at least not undermining) the positive effects of intrinsic motiva- tion on creativity." For example, research in business organizations has uncov- ered several extrinsic motivators operating as supports to creativity: reward and recognition for creative ideas, clearly defined overall project goals, and frequent constructive feedback on the work.^' .1

What determines whether extrinsic motivation will combine positively with intrinsic motivation, or detract from it, in influencing creativity? There are three important determinants: the person's initial motivational state, the type of extrinsic motivator used, and the timing of the extrinsic motivation.

First, the initial level of intrinsic motivation may play a crucial role. It may be that, if a person is deeply involved in the work because it is interesting or personally challenging, that degree of intrinsic motivation may be relatively impervious to the undermining effects of extrinsic motivators. Research has shown that a person's attitudes and motives will be most subject to external influences when those attitudes and motives are vague or ambiguous.^*' So, we might expect additive effects of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation when Intrinsic motivation toward the work is already strong and salient. On the other hand, we might expect negative effects when intrinsic motivation is relatively weak. Thus, if an engineer is passionately interested in the development of the products he is working on, he may be relatively immune to negative effects of extrinsic moti- vators on his intrinsic motivation and creativity.

Second, the type of extrinsic motivation may make a difference. "Syner- gistic extrinsic motivators," including certain types of reward, recognition, and feedback, do not necessarily undermine intrinsic motivation; indeed, they may actually enhance some aspects of performance. These outcomes can result from reward, recognition, and feedback that either confirm competence or provide important information on how to improve performance; these are called infor- mational extrinsic motivators}'^ Positive outcomes can also result from reward, recognition, and feedback that directly increase the person's involvement in the work itself; these are called enabling extrinsic motivators. For example, if a high tech firm recognizes outstanding performance by approving the allocation of additional technical resources to its engineers, the effects on intrinsic motivation are likely to be positive. On the other hand, constraint on how work can be done, as well as other types of reward, recognition, and feedback, will be detri- mental to intrinsic motivation and performance. These "non-synergistic extrinsic motivators," which are controlling extrinsic motivators, may never combine posi- tively with intrinsic motivation, because they undermine a person's sense of self- determination.^^ The engineer who works under stringent controls on how to approach a project, or for whom rewards signify attempts to control his behav- ior, will likely evidence decreased intrinsic motivation and creativity.

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Motivating Creativity in Organizations

Third, the timing of extrinsic motivation may be important. Recall that creative ideas are marked by both novelty and appropriateness. While some stages of the creative process are most important in determining the novelty of an idea, other stages are more important in determining appropriateness. Syner- gistic extrinsic motivators may be most useful at those stages of the creative process where high degrees of novelty do not come into play—such as the gath- ering of background information or the validation of a chosen solution. Here, some level of outward focus, engendered by extrinsic motivation, may cue the problem-solver to the appropriateness of certain kinds of information or the workability of final solutions. However, it may be optimal to reduce all types of extrinsic motivators at those stages requiring the greatest novelty—such as the initial problem formulation or the generation of ideas.

The Intrinsic Motivation Principle

All of this research on motivation leads to the Intrinsic Motivation Prin- ciple of Creativity, which can be formally stated as follows: Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity. Controlling extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity, but informational or enabling extrinsic motivation can be conducive, particularly if initial levels of intrinsic motivation are high.

The Work Environment for Creativity

Although the experimental research is important in establishing causal connections between the social environment, motivation, and creativity, the most directly relevant information comes from interview and survey studies within corporations. It is through these studies that we began to understand the social environment in organizations and how it might impact creativity.

Recently, with my colleagues Regina Conti, Heather Coon, Jeffrey Lazenby, and Michael Herron, I studied the work environments surrounding project teams in a large company that we call High Tech Electronics Interna- tional.^^ Our purpose was to determine whether and how the work environ- ments of highly creative projeas differed from the work environments of less creative projects. The primary research tool was an instrument called KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity. ̂ ° It consists of 78 items that constitute eight scales addressing different aspects of the work environment, plus two scales assessing the work outcomes of creativity and productivity.*' Of the eight envi- ronment scales, six focus on Environmental Stimulants to Creativity—factors that should be positively related to creative work outcomes—including freedom, positive challenge, supervisory encouragement, work group supports, organiza- tional encouragement, and sufficient resources. Two scales focus on Environ- mental Obstacles to Creativity—factors that should be negatively related to creative work outcomes—including organizational impediments and excessive workload pressure. (See Table 1 for scale descriptions.) Data on KEYS gathered

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over a 12-year period, with over 12,000 individual employees from 26 different companies, have established the reliability and validity of this instrument.*^

High Tech is a United States company of over 30,000 employees providing diversified elearonics products to international markets. The company has sev- eral divisions, with a large number of research and development projects going on within each division at any point in time. We conducted this study in three phases, across four divisions and a large number of projects. In Phase I, we asked both technical and non-technical middle-level managers individually to nominate both the highest-creativity and the lowest-creativity project with which they had been involved during the previous three years in the company. For both projects, we asked them to select only from that set of projects in which creativity was both possible and desirable. This eliminated any low creativity projects that simply involved carrying out a routine task, and it allowed us to focus on differences between successful and unsuccessful attempts at creative project work. Instructions to the nominating managers defined creativity as "the production of novel and useful ideas by individuals or teams of individu- als." These managers briefly described each nominated project (using a standard questionnaire) and completed a KEYS work environment assessment on each nominated project.

Phase 2 of the study was conducted to validate the creativity nominations of Phase 1, by allowing independent expert assessments of the level of creativity in the projects nominated in Phase 1. A group of experts from each of the four target divisions was asked to independently rate the projects nominated from that division on creativity and several other dimensions. These experts were unaware of the initial nomination status of the projects, and high- and low- creativity projects were randomly intermixed in the experts' rating question- naires. (They were asked to skip the ratings for any projects with which they were not familiar.)

Phase 3 was conducted to validate any work environment differences between the high- and low-creativity projects discovered in Phase 1. We selected a sub-set of the projeas from Phase 1, those that had been most strongly and reliably rated by the expert judges as either high in creativity or low in creativity. We then asked each member of those project teams to complete a KEYS survey to describe the work environment of his or her particular project. These respon- dents did not know that the study concerned creativity, or that their projects had been chosen for any particular reason. In fact, people were eliminated from par- ticipation in Phase 3 if they had participated in Phase 1. Furthermore, each respondent in Phase 3 focused on only one project, rather than the two contrast- ing projects for Phase 1 respondents. In this way, we attempted to eliminate any biases that might have arisen when the Phase 1 respondents explicitly contrasted the work environment of a project that they considered highly creative with one that they considered quite uncreative.

In Phase 1, the nominated high-creativity projects were significantly higher than the nominated low-creativity projects on all six work environment

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T A B L E I . Summary of Results from Study of High-Creativity and Low-Creativity Projects at

High Tech Electronics International

KEYS

Scale Name KEYS

Scale Description

Direction

of

Difference

Magnitude of Difference in Phase I '

Magnitude

of Difference

in Phase 3

CREATIVITY STIMULANT SCALES

Organizational An organizational culture that encourages Encouragement creativity through the fain constructive

judgment of ideas, rev/ard and recognition for creative work, mechanisms for developing new ideas, an active flow of ideas, and a shared vision of what the organization is trying to do.

High- Creativity higher

Strong^ Strong"

Supervisory A supervisor who serves as a good work High- Encouragement model, sets goals appropriately, supports Creativity

the work group, values individual higher contributions, and shows confidence in the work group.

Moderate"

Work Group A diversely skilled work group in which Supports people communicate well, are open to

new ideas, constructively challenge each other's work trust and help each other and feel commrtted to the work they are doing.

High- Creativity higher

Strong^ Strong^

Sufficient Resources

Challenging Work

Freedom

Access to appropriate resources, including funds, materials, facilities, and information.

A sense of having to work hard on challenging tasks and important projects.

Freedom in deciding what work to do or how to do it; a sense of control over one's work.

High- Creativity higher

High- Creativity higher

High- Creativity higher

Moderate''

Strong^

Strong*'

None

Strong"

Moderate'

Stimulant scales, and significantly lower on the two work environment obstacle scales. (See Table I.) In addition, the high-creativity projeas were higher on the two outcome scales assessing creativity and productivity.

In Phase 2, the expert ratings confirmed the initial nominations made in Phase 1: the previously-nominated high-creativity projeas were indeed rated significantly higher on creativity than the previously-nominated low-creativity projects.

Phase 3 confirmed most of the findings from Phase 1 (see Table 1). Analy- ses of the responses from projea-team members showed that the high-creativity projects were significantly higher than the low-creativity projects on four of the six work environment stimulant scales, and marginally higher on a fifth work

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T A B L E I . Summary of Results from Study of High-Creativity and Low-Creativity Projects at

High Tech Electronics Internationa! (continued)

KEYS

Scale Name

KEYS Scale Description

Direction Magnitude Magnitude of of Difference of Difference

Difference in Phase I ' in Phase 3

CREATIVITY OBSTACLE SCALES

Organizational An organizational culture that impedes Impediments creativity through internal political

problems, harsh crrticism of new ideas, destructive internal competition, an avoidance of risk, and an overemphasis on the status quo.

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