Creativity- The Creative Process

Answer

1. Creativity- The Creative Process

   Creativity is the use of innovativeness to come up with something new. Therefore, being creative involves doing something, like carrying out activities using new techniques. To be creative, one has to be different from the usual norm or way of doing things.  In an organizational setting, creativity could involve carrying out production practices using new means or finding more practical solutions to emerging issues rather than the usual approaches. In contemporary settings, organizational behaviors continuously change to reflect new techniques that can lead to higher production levels. Notably, the way organizational behaviors are enforced, carried out, or influenced needs to be creative to ensure that they result in better outcomes. Principally, this paper explains the concept of creativity in the context of organizational behaviors and why it is crucial in business settings.

   Organizational Behaviors and The Creative Process

   Organizational behaviors as a term concern itself with how people behave in company settings. Notably, varying individuals interact differently with a firm's processes as well as the stakeholders. The key to this interaction is the presence of power structures that are lacking in usual social contexts. For instance, there are managers and supervisors who have more power in a company than junior staff. As such, junior staff often maintain respect when dealing with these superiors. However, in some instances, the junior staff may depict fear when interacting with their supervisors. According to Sözbilir (2018), this fear needs to be eliminated as it may lead to limited communication hence the inability to share creative ideas.

   Creativity has roots in the Bible. For instance, the burning bush was a creative idea by God to capture Moses' attention while also depicting His Godly power. As such, Moses became confident of God's ability even when facing the Pharaohs of Egypt (Exodus, 3: 1). Usually, the creative process involves an interaction between the conscious and subconscious self, which leads to the development of an idea. Often, when this idea is implemented, it leads to the development of new approaches that can be fruitful for the organization. Principally, organizational behaviors have an impact on the creative process. Fundamentally, if stakeholders interact with all company features, including fellow staff, they will have a clear view of the firm. Consequently, they will note where issues might emerge and work on them. In determining solutions to identified problems within specific sections of the organization, the stakeholders may come up with new approaches that reflect creativity.

   The Creative Process

   Creativity occurs in five significant steps of preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. Preparation may include practices like education. In this regard, one learns new knowledge and terms, which can result in developing new approaches for carrying out usual organizational activities when appropriately used. Incubation could be likened to the idea development stage. At this time, the subconscious self realizes a phenomenon that can be exploited to create benefits. In organizational settings, this benefit may be related to enhancing the efficiency of the production process in the firm (Fortwengel, Schüßler, & Sydow, 2016). The insight stage involves the conscious self of a person realizing that a particular activity can be done in a new way. At this time, one might even share the idea with those close by. Usually, most people feel that they are creative at this point as they begin to see things differently. During this stage, the concept of organizational behaviors is crucial in fostering creativity. Ideally, if a junior employee feels that she has a creative idea, she may be open to sharing it with other workmates, including the supervisors, if the relationship between them is warm. However, if the underlying environment influences the junior worker to depict fear while relating to the managers and supervisors, it will be challenging for her to share her creative ideas. Consequently, creativity will be lost.

   The evaluation stage of the creative process focuses on the assessment of the idea to determine its value. In organizational settings, the viability of a creative idea is based on whether it can result in positive changes for the company or not. Primarily, if the idea is viable, the organization may opt to help the individual with the creative thought to implement it within the next step of the creative process; elaboration (McShane, Von Glinow, & Von Glinow, 2005).  Elaboration focuses on determining the best approach to implement an idea to realize significant benefits. Ideally, this stage requires collaboration between various individuals, as each person brings unique capabilities.

   Creativity In Organizations

   Most organizations have policies to recognize and promote creativity. Notably, the approach is carried out by the research and development section of a company. One key consideration in the creative process is the design thinking process. Usually, this process needs to be innovative to ensure that a company develops creative ideas and solutions. Loewe (2019) explains the four rules of design thinking by highlighting the factors which have to be considered to promote creativity. The human rule, which insists on including as many people as possible, enhances creativity by allowing more people in the design thinking process. Fundamentally, many people mean more ideas, which increases the likelihood of generating a creative perspective. Similarly, the ambiguity rule helps enhance creativity by widening the perspective or scope of thinking of the involved personnel. Ideally, if workers focus their thoughts on processes already available at the organization, it will be challenging to come up with a new idea. However, if they can think beyond what is present, it is possible to generate creative thoughts that can be turned into impactful practices for the firm. The re-design rule of the design thinking process is necessary for creativity as it allows involved individuals to review all the available ideas and select those that are impactful. Moreover, the rule can also help re-shape thoughts that appeared unimportant and make them useful for the organization. Even though creativity is preferred in organizations, many creative thoughts turn out to be ineffective. Moreover, some organizations spend a significant amount of capital on developing innovations that fail in the end. As such, the design thinking process's tangible rule is ideal in testing the impact of creativity before implementing it.

   Role of Creativity

   Creativity is hailed for doing away with skill and mindset limitation in people. As such, it is ideal in opening up new avenues for investors. In organizational settings, creativity is essential in increasing productivity. Notably, creative ideas lead to the implementation of innovative practices that allow all activities to be carried out more efficiently.  In so doing, creativity allows the employers to exploit their staff's full potential by enabling them to contribute to the design thinking process rather than sticking only to organization assigned duties. Similarly, creativity fosters innovation. In this regard, as the staff thinks creatively, they come up with innovative ways of doing activities.

   Conclusively, creativity is essential in organizations, especially in contemporary settings where firms are forced to look for alternative ways of surviving in their industries of operations. Notably, creativity involves finding new ways of carrying out activities. By doing this, it fosters innovation. In organizational settings, the underlying behaviors influence creativity development as it can encourage idea development and sharing through proper interactions. Primarily, the design thinking process is key to creativity as it focuses on nurturing the development and implantation of new ideas.

    

    

    

    

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Assessing Risk and Reward

The Nissan Motor Company is one of the leading automobile makers in the world. The Japanese carmaker has primarily enjoyed a successful run, allowing it to enter various regional and international markets such as the United States. However, the changing business environment was not favorable to the company in 2019. Notably, the cooperation recorded losses amounting to 7.8%. The experience pushed the management into making tough decisions, requiring almost all of its North American workforce to go for unpaid leaves.

In late 2019, the company announced that the decline in sales necessitated a two-day unpaid leave for the North American workers. The stated days for the vacation were January 2 and 3^rd    (Chicago Tribune, 2019).  Notably, this move was a crucial decision for the company because of its conflicting impacts. Whereas on the positive side, it could help the firm minimize expenses, it threatened to affect the public perception of the company regarding employee welfare.

The rewards for the decision involved cutting expenses by not paying the workers on leave, which eventually would translate into reduced expenses. Another reward was that the decision could allow the company to optimize performance by evaluating employee performances then developing new milestones. However, on the low side, the company risked affecting its public image and brand name, especially in the North American market. As per Chakravorti (2010), the way an organization treats its employees influences the firm's public perception. Thus, Nissan risked eliciting a negative public perception. With a distorted public image, the company could fail to revive its declining sales.

I would have advised the management of Nissan to utilize the Predictive Analytic perspective in determining the right decision to take. Ideally, the approach tries to predict what might happen in the future if particular decisions or actions are undertaken at the moment (Traymbak & Aggarwal, 2019). Looking at the situation at Nissan, the company needed to develop a goal such as increasing sales. After that, they would have made decisions aimed at realizing the set goal. In this regard, the predicted outcome could give the management an overview of whether more risks existed or significant rewards could be realized.

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