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Creativity and innovation have been buzzwords of managerial discourse over the last few decades as they contribute to the long-term survival and competitiveness of firms. Given the non-linear, causally ambiguous, and intangible nature of all innovation-related phenomena, management scholars have been trying to uncover factors that contribute to creativity and innovation from multiple lenses ranging from organizational behavior at the micro-level to strategic management at the macro-level. Along with important and insightful developments in these research streams that evolved independently from one another, human resource management (HRM) research – especially from a strategic perspective – has only recently started to contribute to a better understanding of both creativity and innovation. The goal of this chapter is to review the contributions of strategic HRM research to an improved understanding of creativity at the individual-level and innovation at the firm-level. In organizing this review, the authors rely on the open innovation funnel as a metaphor to review research on both HRM practices and HRM systems that contribute to creativity and innovation. In the last section, the authors focus on more recent developments in HRM research that focus on ambidexterity – as a way for HRM to simultaneously facilitate exploration and exploitation. This chapter concludes with a discussion of future research directions.

This study proposes a multilevel framework to test the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationships between positive group affective tone (PGAT) and individual/team creativity.

Data are collected from 122 research and development (R&D) teams (including 305 members and 122 team leaders). Hierarchical linear modeling analyses and hierarchical regression analyses are performed to test hypotheses.

The results show that PGAT facilitates individual creativity via enhanced work engagement, and increases team creativity via team information exchange. Supporting the substituting perspective, we found that the positive indirect effects of PGAT on individual/team creativity were attenuated when supervisory support is high.

Although all variables were collected at the same time and the individual-level variables were collected from the same source, our findings highlight the mechanisms explaining the beneficial effects of PGAT on individual/team creativity, and how supervisory support can substitute for such effects.

In order to make the individuals and teams more creative, the organizations need to promote PGAT via the selection of appropriated leader and members or team social events. Moreover, supervisors support is particularly salient in enhancing team creativity when PGAT is low.

This study is the one of the first study to test the motivational/social mechanisms linking the relationship between PGAT and individual/team creativity, and the competing theoretical perspectives regarding how supervisory support can moderate the PGAT–creativity linkage.

The examination of contextual factors that enhance or stifle employees’ creative performance is a new but rapidly growing research area. Theory and research in this area have focused on antecedents of employee creativity. In this paper, we review and discuss the major theoretical frameworks that have served as conceptual foundations for empirical studies. We then provide a review and critical appraisal of these empirical studies. Based on this review, we propose exciting possibilities for future research directions. Finally, we discuss implications of this body of work for human resource management.

Creativity and innovation are important for fulfilling organizational goals. In understanding ways to enhance creativity research has moved on from understanding individual creativity, to an organizational analysis of successful firms that encourage creativity. However, an additional source of creativity stems from direct and indirect leadership and the decisions leaders make to enhance creativity throughout the organization. This chapter examines creativity in film and television as influenced by leadership activities at the organization, team, and individual level and describes lessons learned.

Research on creativity highlights feedback as an important driver of creative ideas. However, it advances a rather mechanistic understanding of communication, which obscures the specific practices in feedback interactions as well as their constitutive role in shaping creative ideas. In this paper, we advance conceptual arguments on how actors interact in communicative feedback processes on creative ideas. By drawing on the theory of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas’ theory of creative action, we develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of creativity as a phenomenon that is constituted in communication. These authors’ work draws conceptual attention to the practices through which actors negotiate the novelty and usefulness of creative ideas in communicative interactions, the important role of feedback givers as creative actors, and “spaces for play” as a communicative sphere that allows creativity to emerge. We extend the literature on creativity by introducing a theory of communicative and creative action that offers to unpack communicative interactions through which creativity does or does not come into being.