The global business scenario, changing nature of work and the shift towards a hybrid workforce are promoting organisations to review the way they are managing their workforce. The workforce composition is changing and so are the ways of working. We have, in our earlier blogs, shared our views on autonomous teams, team creativity and trust – all of which are essential ingredients in the formation of the self-managed and autonomous workforce of the future.

In this blog, we focus on triggering creativity in organisations.

As businesses face rapidly evolving competitive markets, it is important for organisations to up their game, bring the focus on innovative thinking. Creativity facilitates this need for innovation by generating new and novel ideas. By exploiting imaginative strategies to utilize existing resources optimally, creativity helps organisations in sustaining their competitive advantage.

TEAM CREATIVITY

While individual creativity holds high importance in organisational context, research suggests that when most creative individuals come together as a team, it is unlikely that the outcome is highly creative. In our earlier blog, we suggested how STAR employees can encourage team learning. This involves a complex interaction pattern of creative and non-alike members, all members interdependently contributing towards overall creative performance.

Creative teams act as a foundation for innovation in the organization. When team members come together to solve problems, they leverage opportunities through the integration of divergent thoughts and perspectives. Team creativity triggers task complexity in projects. In the initial stages, when task complexity is maintained at moderate levels, members of the team engage in scrutinizing issues and thoughts which forces them to deeply analyse the underlying problems. Members of the team participate in finding new approaches to generate innovation and devise mechanisms to address the problems. This leads to increased learning of team members while developing creative insights and solutions for the problems. Hence, team creativity bridges the gap between individual creativity and organizational creativity.

How organizations benefit from creativity?

The future of organizational success depends on the creative potential of their workforce – and creative capital will emerge as a factor for sustainable competitive advantage. With automation forecasted to eliminate simpler and routinized jobs, creative teams are the need of the hour for complex problem-solving. The development and implementation of new ideas help organisations to sustain their competitive advantage. Additionally, team creativity has also been positively related to corporate brand building. Read our blog for more insights into the reasons creativity is gaining prominence.

So how can organisations trigger creativity in teams?

Knowledge creation at the workplace is determined by the organisations’ contributions towards enhancing individual creativity. The new age workforce is driven by their need for autonomy. To enhance team creativity, organisations need to make their employees autonomous. When employees are provided the freedom to determine their work method, schedule and targets, organizations benefit in the following 3 ways:

• Ownership and work performance – when employees get a feeling that their perspectives and choices at work are important, they experience reduced pressure and demands to serve the external factors at work. The reduced micromanagement accounts for increased sense of ownership in employees leading to effective and sustained performance.

• Productivity gains – They have a perception of being trusted by the management. This perception automatically encourages employees to perform better due to psychological contract, resulting in increased productivity. Employees engage in faster decision-making and cross-functional collaborations to improve innovation in teams.

• Creativity – They hold a relaxed mindset which helps them to engage in more complex problem-solving to foster new and creative ideas. The decision-making authority helps them to move away from existing work techniques and broaden their horizons, facilitating out of the box thinking.

The shift towards self-management promotes minimal governance while acknowledging the use of resources towards the betterment of employees’ creativity.

At Kognoz, we firmly believe in the self-management of employees. This requires creating an environment that promotes independent decision-making and problem-solving. We have observed that providing autonomy support has an immense potential towards increasing the creativity of employees. In our own research of self-managed teams and autonomous workforce, we have identified autonomy as a key dimension that supports the creation of agile organizations and the new-age work.

How are you creating self-managed teams? Would love to hear your views.