The impact of leaders' cognitive style and creativity on organizational problem-solving

Abstract

Purpose

Extensive research has been done to measure the effect of personality and cognitive styles on creativity. However, an in-depth study is required to identify the impact of cognitive style and creativity on organizational problem-solving. The objective of this paper is to look into this lacuna and study the effect of cognitive style and creativity of leaders on their organizational problem-solving.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses a survey-based design. Data have been collected from 90 middle and senior-level managers from a diverse range of industries. The authors assessed their proposed hypotheses by conducting statistical analysis using SPSS and SmartPLS.

Findings

The results of the study reveal that leaders, who've scored high on intuition feeling (NF) cognitive style and proactive creativity, are suitable for solving open type of organizational problems. On the other hand, NF type of leaders with “contributory creativity” are ideal for solving closed type of organizational problems. Further, leaders scoring high on intuition thinking (NT) and proactive creativity are suitable for solving open types of organizational problems. Interestingly, the combination of NT with expected creativity is not suitable for closed type of organizational problems. On the other hand, a leader scoring high on sensing thinking (ST) cognitive style is more prone to perform contributory creativity.

Practical implications

The study would help the human resource (HR) planning processes of an organization. It would assist HR professionals while recruiting, selecting or deploying employees for creative works within an organization. Therefore, the paper would be useful for HR managers, personnel, management development specialists, consultants and HR academicians.

Originality/value

The relationship among cognitive style, creativity and problem type has not been adequately explored in extant literature on leadership and organizational development. This study would thereby enrich the literature.

Citation

Saha, S. and Sharma, R.R.K. (2020), "The impact of leaders' cognitive style and creativity on organizational problem-solving", Benchmarking: An International Journal, Vol. 27 No. 8, pp. 2261-2281. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-09-2019-0398