The Social Side of Creativity: A Static and Dynamic Social Network Perspective

Abstract

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Academy of Management is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Academy of Management Review.We explore the association between the context of social relationships and individual creativity. We go beyond a one-dimensional treatment of social relationships, highlighting the importance of both static and dynamic social network concepts. We argue that weaker ties are generally but not always beneficial for creativity, propose the network positions that facilitate and constrain creative work, and describe three moderators. A spiraling model is presented, capturing the cyclical relationship between creativity and network position. Collectively, our propositions describe an individual's creative life cycle in terms of network position. As firms struggle to establish or maintain prosperity in turbulent and competitive environments, innovation and creativity become increasingly important (DeVanna & Tichy, 1990; Van Gundy, 1987). Not only can creative contributions be valuable to a firm, but the ability to come up with unique yet appropriate ideas and solutions can be an important advantage for individuals as well. Particularly for the professional worker who uses unseen and unobservable inputs like intellect, the ability to incorporate unique and effective twists should help him or her stand out from the crowd. Consistent with its practical relevance, there has been a burgeoning interest among management scholars in understanding what factors influence individual creative contributions. Initial creativity research focused primarily on creativity as an individual trait (see Barron & Harrington, 1981, for a review), but more recent perspectives on creativity tend to focus on how contextual factors can affect an individual's creative activity. Some of these factors are the more objective type, such as the receipt of rewards (Eisenberger & Armeli, 1997), the evaluative context (Shalley & Perry-Smith, 2001), and the complexity of jobs (Oldham & Cummings, 1996); however, in several cases these factors have a decidedly social dimension.It has been proposed that creativity is, in part, a social process. In two prominent creativity models (Amabile, 1988; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993), researchers propose that factors in the work environment, such as supervisory support and social influences resulting from group interaction, are important antecedents to creativity. This more social view of creativity is supported by a limited but growing collection of empirical evidence. For example, several researchers found that cr...

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