Imagination and Creativity in Organizations
By N. Thompson. 2018
93 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Scholars adopting a relational ontology of organisational creativity have shifted attention away from a preoccupation with individual minds towards that which is enacted, emergent, shared, unpredictable and contingent. This article follows suit, yet breaks new ground by reconsidering how the mind plays an active role in unfolding creative interactions by building a bridge between literature on organisational creativity, aesthetics and philosophy of imagination. I draw on English Romanticism to craft a theoretical model of organisational creativity as an aesthetic and relational process of shared imagining. This model demonstrates how organisational members use primary and secondary modes of imagination and creative expression to develop, materialise and share perceptions and images of possible futures. By elaborating on their interplay, this article contributes to literature by theorising an active and generative role of mind that does not have the ontological shortcomings of leading theories. In turn, this has a number of implications for literature on entrepreneurship and organisational creativity in terms of situating and embodying creative thinking, explaining the intentionality and motivation for creative actions, overcoming perceptual differences and changing practices and routines.
Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5b88973fa71e634abda0f89d626ccc5afeea87ae
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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
Citations in the corpus
- A Dynamic Definition of Creativity (2019, background): “, the “four-stage model” (Wallas, 1926), divergent thinking (Guilford, 1950), conceptual recombination (Mumford & Gustafson, 1988), and Csikszentmihalyi’s (1996) psychological theory on the flow state, all share an assumption that the mind is the “site” of creativity (Thompson, 2018).”