Making Creativity an Attractive Option
Creativity in organisations is defined as the generation of new and useful ideas regarding products/services, process and problem solving activities (Amabile, 1996; George Zhou, 2001; Oldham Cummings, 1996) As employee creativity has been seen as a critical impetus for organisational innovation and effectiveness and success, it is unsurprising that much research has been done to identify contextual and personal factors that may foster or hinder creativity (see Shalley, Zhou, Oldham, 2004; Zhou Shalley, 2003) Despite these efforts the creativity research so far has adopted a generic approach assuming creativity will unfold more or less similarly across various contexts regardless whether creativity is overtly required or not. More specifically, little is known about why employees choose to engage in creative activities in a general work environment where creativity is seen as extra role behaviour (i.e. going beyond the existing role expectations) (Van Dyne, Cummings, Parks, 1995) and an alternative option to routine performance (Ford, 1996) Drawing on the reasoned action theory, this chapter aims to discuss employee creativity as an option in a general work environment.