How to kill creativity by Teresa Amabile
Amabile argues that creativity is a function of three components: expertise, creative thinking skills, and motivation.
Managing creativity was what Amabile researched and she has found six general categories that are important for the manager.
Challenge
You need to match people with the right assignements, with the perfect stretch. This means you need to know the people and the assignements.
Freedom
You need to give people the autonomy concerning the means/process but not necessarily the end. In some way I might even argue that some people need to know the end and don’t want to find it themselves. If you set the goals, you need to make sure that they stay stable or meaningful for a longer period in time, as switching goals kill freedom. Autonomy needs to be really granted, not only in name.
Resources
You have time and money to consider here. Time pressure can heighten creativity or kill it. Increasing intrinsic motivation through a challenge is good. Fake deadlines help noone and create distrust. What are the funds a team needs to complete their assignement. Adding more resources above what is sufficient will not boost creativity (Comment: depends on definition of sufficient). But keeping resources too tight means people’s creativity goes into finding resources. Creative teams need open and comfortable offices.
Work-group features
You must create mutually supportive groups with diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. Everyone must share the excitement over the team’s goals and be willing to help each other and recognize the unique knowledge and perspective that everyone brings. You as a manager need to understand their problem-solving styles and their motivational hot buttons. While homogeneous teams reach solutions more quickly they also agree too fast, killing creativity.
Supervisory encouragement
To sustain passion people need to feel that their work matters. I would like to extend this to the fact that it needs to matter for something they care about. You need to recognize creative work without offering specific rewards. Remember that ideas must be new and useful but dead ends can end up being enlightening. you might try to serve as a role model.
Organizational support
Creativity flourishes when the entire organization supports it. support does not mean bribing people though. Information sharing and collaboration is important.