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Creativity is a strongly context related, collective and collaborative task across multiple boundaries that are of immaterial and material nature. Numerous factors play a role in the emergence of creativity. Leadership styles and diversity have undoubtedly an impact on team creativity. Creative teams face many processes inherent paradoxes which leaders and members need to balance and overcome together. According to the observations and research findings discussed in this chapter, effective management of diversity for creativity requires a ‘humble leadership’ style as well as different communication competencies and strategies. This book chapter provides theoretical and practical insights for those responsible for diversity management in creative teams, based on two empirical studies conducted between 2019 and 2022. Competencies and strategies are presented that may help leaders and teams navigate through highly dynamic, paradoxical interaction processes and, thus, turn their diversity into a creativity asset. In addition, a glimpse of the Team Creativity Navigator (TCN) is offered, which is a new assessment and development tool that supports leaders’ and team members’ learning processes for inclusive, creativity enhancing collaboration. As such, our chapter is an empirically based conceptual contribution with the objective of providing practitioners (and researchers) with insights into appropriate strategies to boost creativity in diverse teams.

Innovation originally meant ‘change’ or ‘renewal’. Over time, it became associated with creating new products, methods, materials, markets, and forms of organisation. Today, in everyday language, innovation is used as a much broader term that encompasses non-materialistic, non-economical ideas such as social, educational, philosophical, political, environmental, or spiritual innovations. What makes something innovative is subjective and depends not only on the perceived novelty of the content but also on the co-constructed meaning of what is possible or what it changes in our lives. Therefore, innovation leaders must also become experts in co-constructing meanings with their teams. In this chapter, a structured solution-focused framework will be introduced with the intent to support innovative teams in maintaining effective team dialogue, foster more innovative team collaboration, better innovations, or an improved innovation process. In fostering an interactive and dynamic team process, solution-focused leaders engage in deliberate interactions that often initiate a positive dynamic leading into an even more innovative future.

It is suggested that, to be successful, innovation teams should be small and consist of people with key expertise who want to participate and develop new solutions within their organisations. When it comes to conducting innovation work, I suggest shared leadership may be a factor influencing success. In this chapter, a theoretical framework is presented on the shared leadership of innovation teams. The key to establishing shared leadership in innovation teams is to plan for it as the team is created, not after the team has already been formed, as this may result in various problems in the intended innovation project. The proposed framework details key aspects to consider; some of which are related to external factors such as management and resources, and some to internal factors such as the team’s size, competencies, and their ability to develop norms and ways of working together. The proposed framework is applicable for managers, innovation leaders, and team members, and contributes to previous research on shared leadership and innovation leadership. Further research on the proposed framework is suggested.

In this chapter, the authors make the case that preserving and curating knowledge for the future involves more than changing methods and tactics or extending our current applications and technology to support knowledge capital. It means changing the way we think about the future. It means envisioning multiple futures where various elements may be known or unknown – a four-future quadrant. First, the authors explain what it means to think strategically in multiple known and unknown futures. Next, the chapter presents ideas for strategic thinking about future knowledge preservation and curation. Finally, the authors consider using the four futures to develop a flexible and relevant knowledge preservation and curation strategy.

This chapter first describes the essential aspects of a currently changing world, which is characterised by digitalisation, globalisation and politically unstable situations. Based on this transformation context, key concepts such as leadership, innovation, innovation leadership and leadership competences are introduced, along with a new definition and framework for innovation leadership. The chapter discusses the distinction between innovation leadership and innovation management, and the connecting lines between these two concepts. The innovation leadership framework is described and related to the individual contributions of the authors in the book. The chapter frames these contributions along the dimensions of self-leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership and ecosystem leadership.

Strategic management is traditionally seen as an exclusive managerial task rather than inclusive where accountability is reserved for top managers. However, contemporary strategy management practices increasingly pay attention to equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) by engaging with broader internal and external stakeholders via more open business models such as ecosystems. Hence, central to our examination is the concept of openness disposition, which in the context of strategic management refers to the tendency of individuals, collectives, and managers to make strategy transparent, participatory, and/or inclusive, or look for closure. While openness in strategy is regarded as a positive means of contemporary management, fostering diversity, creativity, innovation, and empowerment, there are some researched downsides too. The purpose of this chapter is to address the openness puzzle in strategy and gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of bottom-up strategy initiatives, and investigate the associated dilemmas, if any in the context of manufacturing small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We contribute to addressing the performative effects of the dynamic expansion and contraction in openness within the SME strategy process while using the concept of openness dilemmas, tensions, and disposition. Using the Management Control Theory, this chapter will combine theory with SME practitioners’ experiences of bottom-up strategy initiatives to increase EDI in their organisations. Based on findings that emerged from a four-year longitudinal multiple case study research with 10 European SMEs, we found that bottom-up strategy exercises are more interactive. They consider a greater number of views, increase legitimacy, and EDI at the workplace, and yield more process benefits, but are time-consuming and difficult to organise that require special attention to the capability, reciprocity, and credibility dimensions.

The existing literature on abusive supervision, defined as a perception by subordinates that their supervisor displays hostility toward them (but falling short of physical abuse), is deficient insofar as it fails to account for workgroup differences in employees' perceptions of abusive supervision. We therefore sought to study such differences, which refer to as “abusive supervision dispersion (ASD).”

We interviewed 40 employees from a variety of organizations in Australia, focusing on the role of affective events in ASD dynamics, with a view to understanding how this phenomenon relates to individual and team processes.

We found that ASD stimulates employees to harbor negative emotions and resentment toward their supervisor, causing them to perceive even positive events negatively. We found further that, while low ASD facilitates team-member exchange by forcing abused members to band together resulting in low team conflict, high dispersion facilitates formation of subgroups and high team conflict.

These findings illuminate the paradoxical nature of ASD and suggest that employees experience dispersion through three paradoxes: (1) dispersion paradox, (2) resentment paradox, and (3) team paradox. Overall, these findings suggest that subordinates' perceptions of high ASD are associated with detrimental impacts on team performance.

This chapter reviews the key findings and innovation leadership insights from this book, as well as pointing out directions for future research. We find a series of learning insights for people engaged in innovation leadership, at the distinct levels of self-leadership, team leadership, organisational leadership, and ecosystem leadership. We also find commonalities across these levels, as well as differences that reflect the complexity of these different leadership arenas. Leadership practice that orchestrates contributions from diverse viewpoints, seeing itself as with the group, rather than above it, is most likely to help turn ideas into value in repeatable ways. We also find evidence that mindset, skills, and behaviours are all important in the make-up of competencies. We point to the requirement for further research at all four levels, to bring further insights in what is still an emerging field; as well as a need for more research into competency development for innovation leadership; and we advocate a research approach that emphasises relational leadership, acknowledging that most leadership practice is shared across people.

This chapter illustrates the concept of organisational innovation leadership (OIL) through a case study of the organisational transformation of Eddyfi Technologies to achieve superior innovative capacity through synergetic centralisation. The case study focusses on the real challenges faced when effecting organisational transformation, and how innovation leadership practices provided constructive resolutions that culminated in a successful reorganisation. We find that effective innovation leadership is conveyed primarily through establishing close relationships, open communication, and setting the example in a consistent and strict manner.