If What You Want is not What You Get: A Communication‐Based Approach to Top Managers' Intended Firm Creativity and Employees' Failure to Deliver

• Published date: 01 September 2017
• Author: Sonja Sperber,Christian Linder
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12104
• Date: 01 September 2017

If What You Want is not What You Get: A

Communication-Based Approach to Top

Managers’Intended Firm Creativity and

Employees’Failure to Deliver

CHRISTIAN LINDER

1

and SONJA SPERBER

2

1

Faculty of Economics and Management, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

2

International School of Management, ISM CampusFrankfurt/Main, Germany

There often exists a gap between the level of creativity aimed for by the company’s top managers and the level

actually realized. In this article, we draw on Speech Act Theory and the Jakobsonian model of communication to

investigate the reasons for this gap. We identify the top managerial as well as organizational conditions that shape

and determine the way in which actors interpret information. By means of configuration analysis, we identify eight

distinct configurations, which represent stable paths to reach the top managers’intended level of firm creativity. As

the main contribution of this paper, we explain the reasons for the distance between the intended firm creativity by

the top managers and the actually realized creative solutions by the workforce. This paper makes a further

contribution to the interpretive approach in creativity management by highlightingthe importance of speech acts.

Keywords: top manager; creativity; communication theory; communication effectiveness; absorptive capacity

Introduction

In the past, many studies have focused on investigating

the influence of the company’sleaders,attop

management level, on various aspects of organizational

life. For instance, aspects concerning the strategic focus

(e.g., Deniset al., 1996; Kor, 2006), new product launches

to the market (e.g., Eisenhardt and Tabrizi, 1995),and the

organization’s cultural setting (e.g., Bass and Avolio,

1994; Jung and Takeuchi, 2010). Even though the focus

during previous years has continuously shifted towards

an inclusive view of the workforce within managerial

tasks, as for example in participative leadership (e.g.,

Somech, 2006; Lam et al., 2015), the company’stop

managers are still recognized as the essential influencing

force in organizational concerns. This important influence

specifically affects organizational creativity and the

execution of activities concerning innovation, and hence

the firm’s overall innovativeness (Bantel and Jackson,

1989; Carpenter et al., 2004; Elenkov et al., 2005;

Ireland andHitt, 1999). Thus, as the organizational leaders

are viewed as essential shapers and influencers of

organizational operations, including those of creativity,

they hold significant power in shaping the organization.

However, despite the recognized significant impact of

the organizational leaders on creativity, both researchers

and practitioners have continued to recognize that often

there is a gap between the creativity aimed for by the

company’s top managers (TMs)and the creativity actually

realized, which eventually leads to a missing congruence

of the two levels of creativity. In this respect, TMs’

initiatives to foster and promote creativity, which we

generally define as ‘a constellation of personality and

intellectual traits shown by individuals who, when given

a measure of free rein, spend significant amounts of time

in engaged in the creativeprocess’(Findlay and Lumsden,

1988: 85), often are inconclusive and fail to result in the

intended outcome. This occurring distance is what we

refer to the ‘gap’between the intended level of creativity

by the top managerial layers of an organization and the

realized level on the employees’side. This outcome

ultimately provokes the question as to why the TMs’

attempt to foster creat ivity fails to reach i ts expectations

and intended outcomes. In this context, Shalley and

Correspondence:Christian Linder,Faculty of Economicsand Management,

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Università 5, 39100 Bolzano,

Italy. Tel:+39(0)471/01330. E-mailchristian.linder@unibz.it

European Management Review, Vol. 14, 227–246, (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/emre.12104

©2017 European Academy of Management

Gilson (2004) point out that most TMs indeed want their

employees to be more creative, but most of these leaders

fail to understand what causes the gap between desired

and realized creative performance.

In order to address this knowledge gap on the shortfall

of the creative outcome, numerous researchers have

highlighted the impact of leadership on fostering

creativity at al l levels, including t he individual, grou p

and organizational level (e.g., Anderson and King, 1993;

Mumford and Gustafson, 1988; Shalley and Gilson,

2004); the fostering of creativity aims at preventing an

outcome in which the desired and the realized

performance differ. In detail, the effects of the leadership

executed through the top managers hereby concerns

different fields of action on the several levels mentioned:

accordingly, leaders play an active role in providing

organizational structures and work environment

conditions, a creativity-valuing climate and culture, as

well as rewards and motivation which encourage people

to generate new ideas and innovative solutions (Drazin

et al., 1999; Mumford, 2000). Most of the recent studies

associated wit h top managerial i nfluence on

organizational creativity thereby are inspired by the

fundamental theoretical work of authors like Amabile

(1988, 1996), Csikszentmihalyi (1999), Ford (1996), or

Woodman et al. (1993), who have contributed

significantly to the current understanding by providing

models for organizational creativity. New research

approaches have advanced the topic into new spheres of

interest such as the impact of organizational creativity at

individual and its correlation with emotional intelligence

(e.g., Jafriet al., 2016). Other areas investigated have been

the effectiveness of creative practices in organizations

(e.g., Bratnicka, 2015), and the impact of the top

managerial characteristics (e.g., Yoonet al., 2015). These

general frameworks, when applied to current research,

represent a description of factors which at best should

enhance employees’creativity, but also can hinder it

(Reiter-Palmon and Illies, 2004).

However, models of creativity developed in the past –

among them the prominent ones of the ‘Systems Theory

of Creativity’by Csikszentmihalyi (1988, 1999) and the

‘Componential Theory of Individual Creativity’by

Amabile (1988, 1996) –are limited in their explanation

of the variance between TMs’intended and realized

creativity, as their focus is directed at measuring the

creative effort of individual actors rather than the fact that

the intentionand realization of the efforts mightdiffer. On

this basis, we argue that one important link is missing in

these past models:they do not pay attention to the fact that

every TM’s attempt to inspire employees, motivate them,

or encourage them to contribute to creativity is encoded

into a message and has to be transferred and subsequently

decoded bythe workforce. This is a possiblereason for the

gap in outcomes, as the TM’s message transmitted to the

employee(s) differs from the message that is received by

the workforce. We therefore theorize that

communication regarding creativity is a complex and

difficult process; this process generally is subject to

numerous obstacles rooted in the process of encoding

and decoding, which affect its outcome. Thus, the

communication processes itself is a potential hindrance

to creativity and may be held responsible for the gap

between the TMs’intended creativity and that realized

by the workforce.

In order to address this topic and investigate the

difference in intended and actual outcomes, we have

based our theoretical framework on three concepts, which

are interlinked and which constitute theoretical

fundamentals for this analysis. First, we refer to the

absorptive capacity of the workforce, which is defined as

a set of routines and processes by which knowledge and

information are acquired, assimilated, transformed, and

exploited to produce a creative output (George and Zhou,

2002). We theorize that TMs’fostering of creativity is

hindered by the way in which content is communicated,

stating that the knowledge exchange between units does

not take place efficiently. We demonstrate that the

relationship between a TM and the workforce is always

characterized by differences in perception, skills,

knowledge, information, and personality traits, which

ultimately affect the dyadic communication process in

terms of how employees interpret a TM’s message and

vice versa. To provide a practical example: a TM with a

MBA degree and a background in finance is employed

at an internationalfashion firm, havinga broad knowledge

of retailers, pricing, and the market environment. When

speaking with, for example designers, professionals with

different capabilities, interests, values, and visions

regarding the fashion products and the label as a whole,

he would face a high level of challenge in order to

communicate effectively. In particular, the

communication of these actors regarding creativity is

highly affected by their differences in perception and

knowledge, eventually affecting the message sent from

the TM to the designer from being understood and

interpreted correctly (Lorenzen and Frederiksen, 2005).

In this case, mattersof absorptive capacity thus the impact

on creativity intended by the TM from being realized.

The two further theoretical concepts applied are the

Speech Act Theory by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969)

and, consequentially the classic Jakobsonian model of

communication (Jakobson, 1960). Within our approach,

the latter is expanded by the reference to the concept of

absorptive capacity in order to explain the gap between

intended and realized creativity. In following this

theoretical procedure, our study aims to investigate this

existing gap,while our research question readsas follows:

‘To what degree is absorptive capacityresponsible for the

difference prevailing between the intended and the

228 C. Linder and S. Sperber

©2017 European Academy of Management