You Can Be Creative Thinking Inside the Box

RESEARCH BY BEATRICE MANZONI AND FEDERICO MAGNI FINDS THAT THE COMBINATION OF CONSCIENTIOUSNESS AND CONFORMITY CAN BOOST A KIND OF CREATIVITY USEFUL IN A WORKING ENVIRONMENT

We can like powerful cars, but a successful slogan reminds us that “power is nothing without control”. In the same way, firms need creativity, but creative employees risk being useless if they don’t conform to existing norms in the organization. Luckily, and somehow unexpectedly, Beatrice Manzoni (SDA Bocconi and Department of Management and Technology), in a paper co-authored with Federico Magni (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), finds that creativity and conformity can coexist and conformity, in some cases, can even have positive impact on creativity.
 
“Relying on theoretical perspectives that suggest an interaction between social and cognitive factors,” Professor Manzoni says, “we investigated the effect of the personality traits of openness to experience and conscientiousness on the conformity-creativity relationship.”
 
The authors collected data on a sample of over 100 employees in a large architectural studio in Milan. Standard questionnaires able to capture personal and social traits such as openness, consciousness, and conformity were submitted to the employees, who were classified as creative or not creative according to the opinion of their supervisors.
 
As expected, the most creative employees turned out to be those neither conscientious nor conforming. “Yet this strong, disruptive creativity might not be the kind that organizations need most of the time,” Professor Magni says. “Instead, high conformity paired with high conscientiousness leads to a higher level of creativity than any other combination of the two, which is likely the sweet spot that organizations are looking for.”
 
“This information is helpful for managers who require a certain extent of creativity, but who also want their employees to conform to existing norms and rules. When such conforming employees are also conscientious, their creativity is not likely to be hampered much. Their creativity is more likely to take into account the regulatory, process, and input constraints that are common when a firm is engaged in innovation”, says Prof. Manzoni.
 
Another surprising find is the lack of relationship between openness and creativity, which contradicts past literature. “This asks for further research,” Prof. Manzoni concludes, “but our hypothesis is that it can depend on the kind of creativity we’ve measured: useful and functional, more than disruptive.”
 
Magni, F., and Manzoni, B. (2020) “When Thinking inside the Box Is Good: The Nuanced Relationship between Conformity and Creativity.” European Management Review, 17: 961– 975. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/emre.12414.
 

by Fabio Todesco