Leadership and Creativity in Organizational Behavior

Because leadership and creativity represent two of the most popular topics in the fields of management and organizational behavior, it should not be surprising that a large body of literature has emerged in which the two are jointly examined. Leadership is a commonly studied independent variable, whereas creativity is an outcome of paramount importance for organizations, and the two are also theoretically connected in several ways, suggesting that leadership could precipitate followers’ creative outcomes. This relationship pattern, called “creative leadership,” is the most common way leadership and creativity interact in the extant scholarship. Most of the existing work has focused on “facilitating” creative leadership, in which followers (but not leaders) generate creative outputs, often as a result of leadership behaviors and styles, relationships, or the characteristics of their leader. This work generally finds that positive leadership precipitates positive creative outcomes, although some findings have emerged suggesting that considerable nuance may exist in these relationships, a promising area for future research. Much less scholarship has examined how leaders might direct others to implement their own creative visions, or how leaders might integrate their own creative efforts with those of their followers to enhance overall creativity. Research on these forms of creative leadership is often limited to specific creativity-relevant industries, such the culinary field and the arts, but there is opportunity to examine how they might operate in more general organizational fields. Other phenomena linking leadership and creativity are plausible but less understood. For instance, leaders may assemble creative contexts, engage in unconventional behavior, or emerge as leaders regardless of their hierarchical positions. Least explored of all is the idea of an opposite causal order—that of creativity affecting leadership, such that creative acts or experiences by an organizational member might drive or alter leadership emerging from themselves, their managers, or their followers. After review of the extant literature in these areas, potential topics for future scholarship are identified within and among the different research streams.

The Geography of Giving in the Philanthropic Field

Drawing on the neo-institutional notion of organizational fields, we propose the concept of the philanthropic field to conceptualize the geography of giving and the interrelations of benevolent activities across the domains of private, public, and civic sectors. Empirically, we adopt a multi-method approach, including a media analysis of reported acts of giving in the German region of Heilbronn-Franconia, a social network analysis of its regional philanthropic relations, and qualitative interviews with representatives of non-profit organizations, corporations, and public as well as private intermediaries. Based on our analysis, we conclude that the philanthropic field is constituted by diverse actors from all sectors of society who engage in specialization, division of labor, and collaboration. Moreover, practices of giving spread across geographical scales, though the majority of activity concentrates on the local and regional level. We conclude by discussing the potentials and limits of our approach as a means to gain insights into local fields of philanthropy and benevolent action across societal sectors.

Organizational Persistence in Highly Institutionalized Environments: Unpacking the Relation Between Identity and Resilience

Despite growing academic interest in understanding the conditions under which resilient organizations adapt to challenging circumstances, little attention to date has been paid to the role played by ‘soft’ factors such as identity as an enabler or property of resilient behaviour. In this chapter, we propose that different forms of legitimacy contribute to the framing of acceptable identities affecting the endurance of central elements over time, thus shaping resilience. By splitting up forms of legitimacy and by analysing elements of organizational identity separately, we provide a novel framework that enables a deeper understanding of identity formation processes in complex environments on the one hand and their links with resilience on the other. Through a historically based analysis of a Nordic university over a 40-year period, we demonstrate the complex, dynamic relationship between external legitimacy, identity adaptation and resilience in the context of organizational transformation. By establishing a link between identity, legitimacy and resilience, the study provides critical insights into the conditions affecting organizational persistence within highly institutionalized organizational fields, such as higher education.

Deinstitutionalization revisited

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to offer a new analysis and understanding of the notion of deinstitutionalization. Deinstitutionalization of taken-for-granted practices as a natural consequence of ever-increasing entropy seems to directly contradict the major institutional thesis, namely, that over time isomorphic forces increase and, as a result, possibilities for deinstitutionalization decrease culminating in the impossibility of abandoning in highly institutionalized fields. Design/methodology/approach This paper is conceptual in nature. Oliver’s 1992 paper on deinstitutionalization is taken as a key text on the subject and as a starting point for building an alternative theory of deinstitutionalization. More broadly, institutional theory and organizational literature on diffusion/adoption are reviewed and synthesized. Findings The authors argue that possibilities for deinstitutionalization have been overestimated in institutional literature and offer a revisited account of deinstitutionalization vs institutional isomorphism and institutionalized vs highly diffusing-but-not-institutionalized practices. A freedom for choice between alternative practices exists during the pre-institutional stage but not when the field is already institutionalized. In contrast, institutionalized, taken-for-granted practices are immutable to any sort of functional and political pressures and they use to persist even when no technical value remains, thus deinstitutionalization on the basis of a functional dissatisfaction seems to be a paradox. Research limitations/implications By revisiting the nature and patterns of deinstitutionalization, the paper offers a better conceptual classification and understanding of how organizations adopt, maintain and abandon organizational ideas and practices. An important task of this paper is to reduce the scope of application of deinstitutionalization theory to make it more focused and self-consistent. There is, however, still not enough volume of studies on institutional factors of practices’ abandonment in institutional literature. The authors, therefore, acknowledge that more studies are needed to further improve both the former deinstitutionalization theory and the framework. Originality/value The authors offer a solution to this theoretical inconsistency by distinguishing between truly institutionalized practices and currently popular practices (highly diffused but non-institutionalized). It is only the latter that are subject to the norms of progress that allow abandoning and replacing existing organizational activities. Deinstitutionalization theory is, thus can be applied to popular practices that are subject to reevaluation, abandonment and replacement with new optimal practices while institutions are immutable to these norms of progress. Institutions are immutable to deinstitutionalization and the deinstitutionalization of optimal practices is subject to the logic of isomorphic convergence in organizational fields. Finally, the authors revisit a traditional two-stage institutional diffusion model to explain the possibility and likelihood of abandonment during different stages of institutionalization.

A Matter of Transition: Authenticity Judgments and Attracting Employees to Hybridized Organizations

Category-spanning organizations have been shown to face a number of penalties compared with organizations occupying a single category. The assumption seems to be, however, that organizations spanning the same categories will be evaluated similarly. Yet, this is not always the case. We know far less about why evaluations may differ within category-spanners, largely due to existing studies’ focus on comparing single-category to category-spanning organizations in equilibrium states at a fixed point in time. Instead, this paper investigates audience judgments of organizations as they transition from single to multiple categories. We rely on the empirical setting of social-commercial hybrids—an intriguing context in which to explore category-spanning across market and nonmarket domains associated with distinct values, norms, and expectations. In a series of two experimental studies, we investigate how hybridization affects audience judgments of organizational authenticity and the ability to attract potential employees. We find that across organizational fields associated with nonprofit (communal) and for-profit (market exchange) norms, hybridization—more than hybridity itself—triggers audience cynicism and leads to decreased judgments of authenticity. However, the penalties for hybridizing are only observed when organizations also move away from field-level profit-status norms. The findings contribute to the category-spanning and authenticity literatures by integrating social psychological and organizational theory perspectives to offer a dynamic view of spanning beyond for-profit, market contexts. They also offer empirical support for the theorized multidirectionality of mission drift in hybrid organizations, while suggesting that drifting need not always be detrimental.

Institutional change, entrepreneuring and place: Building a Smart State

We shed new light on the processes through which institutions are created and changed by investigating the question how does institutional entrepreneuring unfold in an already organized world. We conducted a longitudinal case study of the field of scientific research production in Australia, which changed over three decades through entrepreneuring processes associated with the creation of a new ‘Smart State’ place in the city of Brisbane in Queensland. A new place is a form of organizing human activity that has materiality and meaning at a specific geographic location. Our findings showed how field change was interwoven with place creation through four processes of entrepreneuring: structural emancipation, dissociating and reimagining place meanings, bricolaging of place forms, and co-evolving place identities. These entrepreneuring processes constituted the field as a flow of ‘becoming’ that spilled over into temporary and provisional settlements in local places. Our findings make important contributions through: (1) deepening understanding of how organizational fields change through multilevel, distributed, cascading and often unreflexive processes of entrepreneuring processes in an already organized world, (2) bringing attention to a relationship between institutions and place, in which place is both the medium and outcome of institutional entrepreneuring, and (3) providing new insight into embedded agency by illustrating how institutions in ‘becoming’ continually (re)produce the resources and possibilities for agency within gradual institutional change over time.

Toward a Discursive Approach to the Hybridization of Practice: Insights from the Case of Servitization in France

Hybrid practices incorporate conflicting institutional logics and are recognized for their capacity to cope with societal problems. Previous literature has concentrated on the hybridization mechanisms inherent in organizations. This focus on an entity has diverted attention away from equivalent mechanisms that operate in wider social systems – specifically, in organizational fields. In this article, I show how discourses can enable such mechanisms. To that end, descending hierarchical classifications were performed on media outlets to study the discourse on the emergence of servitization in France. The results reveal two original mechanisms enabled by discourses and supporting the hybridization of the practice under study: (1) practice renaming and (2) the pivotal role played by the institutional logic of environmental protection. Based on these results, I propose a model detailing how institutional logics and discourses interact to bring about a hybrid practice. This model offers original insights to develop knowledge on hybrid organizing and promote practices that realign business goals with those associated with social welfare and preservation of the natural environment.

The Sequence of Isomorphism—: The Temporal Diffusion Patterns of Quality Management in Higher Education Institutions and Hospitals

Isomorphism has been widely used to describe why trends penetrate entire organizational fields. However, research so far has neglected the temporal aspects of such diffusion processes and the organizational reasons underlying the introduction of new management tools. We argue that during reform waves, the reasons for adopting the new tools differ over time. Using comparative data from two surveys on quality management in the field of higher education and the health sector, we show that early adopters are more likely to be motivated by instrumental reasons, while late adopters will more likely be motivated by institutional reasons.