Creativity and innovation as defined by workers

Abstract

Creativity and innovation are now required given the new configurations in work processes, in organizational formats, in physical and intangible technologies, as well as in products and markets. In parallel with the growing centrality and interest in the phenomena of creativity and innovation, a broadening of its concepts is observed. The inflation and trivialization of uses tend to make them self-explanatory and not very enlightening regarding situations to which they apply and the associated effects. The lack of conceptual clarity thus contributes both to undermining policies to promote creativity and innovation in organizations, as well as to hinder the employees' adherence to such policies. The study aimed to characterize the key elements of workers' informal definitions of creativity and innovation, and identify their alignment with definitions and theoretical perspectives. The study included 231 workers from Portuguese-, Spanish-, and Basque-speaking countries, aged 22-75 years. The qualitative data analysis software ATLAS.ti 7 was used for coding and categorization. One point of convergence with the specialized literature was that creativity and innovation strongly associated with novelty in the development of an idea / product / process / service. Creativity, however, is defined more in terms of dispositional factors rather than contextual and situational factors, diverging from current theoretical perspectives. Planning as a key aspect for organizational innovation development is practically absent from the workers' definitions. It discusses some impacts of these settings for organizational management practices.