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Leading a Culture of Innovation

47 important questions on Leading a Culture of Innovation

What do Jung, Chow, and Wu present as an important factor in enhancing organizational innovation?

Transformational leadership -> support for innovation -> organizational innovation (r2=0.33)
Transformational leadership -> empowerment -> organizational innovation (r2=0.02)

intotal r2=0.48

What is necessary according to Ahmed for an organization for increasing the innovative output?

-synergy= diversity (e.g. the parts) x cohesion( integration) x empowerment (you need gas)

What is Reverse engineering

the process of extracting knowledge. Often involves disassembling something and analyzing its component parts and working in detail.

In Synergy, diversity will lead to...cohesion will lead to....and the interaction will lead to...

1. explosion, 2. implosion, 3 empowerment.

In Synergy, team performance will lead to outcomes through two things, which?

innovation, implementation.

Living abroad predicts creativity, give the mediation level and its correlation.

                             adaptation | 0.35
                       ^                      V
               0.01 |
time lived abroad --r=0.01--> creativity

What is a T-shaped employee

it is an employee with to things, first: collaborative potential, second: depth of expertise in one area.

Collective intelligence factor (c) predicts the performance of humans groups, which ones do not predict c and which do.

do not: cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction.
tested were: social sensitivity, speaking turn variance, and percent female.
do: social sensitivity is as the only one significant correlated to C.

What does the studie tell us about physical proximity and social ties?

physical proximity and social ties are related to each other. with other words to more doors you are away of your own the fewer people you know. small distances played a big rol in social ties.

What is a tangible shared goal?

a product-focused approach, from strategy to talent management are designed around 'the product'.

How can you minimize status within the team and create status for the team?

maximize group status: winning titles, good publicity.
minimizing status within group: run the organization by ideas, not hierarchy.

What is autonomy and name 3 basic elements

Acting with freedom to meet organizational objectives with accountability. does not mean complete independence.
1) choice over task
2) choice over time
3) choice over technique

What is the set-up strategies which lead to team processes.

Cross-functional diversity and physical proximity leads to diversity
shared goals, norms, shared activities leads to cohesion. status maximized for the group and minimized within the group leads to empowerment.

Teams in Organisations: What is a team?

A group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal.

Team in Organisations: What are the 5 key defining characteristics of teams?

Exist to achieve a shared goal
members are interdependent regarding a common goal
are bounded and remain relatively stable over time
members have the authority to manage their own work and internal processes
operate in a larger social system context

What is a working group?

A group of people who learn from one another and share ideas, but are not interdependent in an important fashion and are not working toward a shared goal.

State 2 reasons why organisations should have teams (Team in Org.):

Teams and teamwork are not a novel concept
teams can be more effective than traditional hierarchical structure for making decisions quickly and efficiently.

What is a manager-led team?

A team in which the manager acts as the team leader and is responsible for defining the goals, methods, and functioning of the team.

What is a self-managing or self-regulating team?

A team in which a manager or leader determines overall purpose or goal of the team, but the team is at liberty to manage methods by which to achieve goals.

What is a self-directing or self-designing team?

Teams that determine their own objectives and methods by which to achieve objectives.

What is a self-governing team?

Teams responsible for executing tasks, managing their own performance processes, designing the group, and designing the organisational context.

Team in Org.: What is the most common type of teams?

-> Cross-fuctional project group (service, operations, marketing)

Team in Org.: team size

Teams should gernerally be less than 10 members (5 or 6 is optimum)

Team in Org.: What are the 6 most desired aspects of managerial education?

Developing and sustaining high motivation
Developing clear goals
Fostering creativity and innovation
Training
Minimising confusion and coordination problems

Team in Org.: What are the 3 steps (with sub steps) to develop your team-building sills?

1. Sill 1: Accurate diagnosis of team problems

Sampling on the dependent variable
Hindsight bias

2. Skill 2: Theory-based intervention
3. Skill 3: Expert Learning

Single-loop versus double-loop learning
Inert knowledge problem

What is the inert knowledge problem?

The inability to recall knowledge that we actually possess.

What is the misattribution error?

The tendency for people to attribute the cause of failure to forces beyond their personal control.

What is single-loop learning?

Learning in which interactions between parties are primarily one-dimensional, rather than reciprocal.

Jung, Chow & Wu (2003): Transformational leadership emphasises longer-term and vision-based motivational processes. This leadership style is characterised as being composed of 4 unique but interrelated behavioural components. Name them!

inspirational motivation (articulating an appealing and/or evocative vision)
intellectual stimulation (promoting creativity and innovation)
idealised influence (charismatic role modelling)
individualised consideration (coaching and mentoring)

Leaders with these 4 components are able to realign their follower's values and norms, promote both personal and org. changes, and help followers to exceed their initial performance expectations.

Jung, Chow & Wu (2003): What were their 4 hypotheses? (just hypotheses, not results!)

H 1: Transformational leadership is positively related to organizational innovation.
H 2: Transformational leadership is positively related to employees’ perceptions of (a) empowerment and (b) support for innovation.
H 3: Employees’ perceptions of (a) empowerment and (b) support for innovation have a positive relationship with organizational innovation.

H 4: Employees’ perceptions of (a) empowerment and (b) support for innovation moderate the relationship between transformational leadership and organisational innovation such that the relationship will be stronger when perceived empowerment/support for innovation is high rather than low.

Jung, Chow & Wu (2003): Explanation for their unexpected results regarding hypotheses 3 and 4:

Their findings imply that companies, which delegate more autonomy to employees, are less rather than more innovative. However, all of their sample companies had come from Taiwan, where cultural values are relatively high in power distance. Within this type of culture, employees tend to prefer having top managers take more control of the work process ad to lead by example.

2.3 What are the three steps of innovation?

idea generation phase (self-explanatory),
structured methodology phase – consists of some type of stage-gate system (hoops which the new idea must pass in order to demonstrate its feasibility and compatibility),
commercialization – the product is produced to allow extraction of value from all that has been created in the earlier phases.

2.3 Innovation cultures and innovation climates: what are the 4 dimensions of climate defined by Scheider et al (1996)?

nature of interpersonal relationships (e.g., is there trust or mistrust?; are relationships reciprocal and based on collaboration, or are they competitive?),
nature of hierarchy (e.g., are decisions made centrally or through consensus and participation?; is there a spirit of teamwork or is work more or less individualistic?),
nature of work (e.g., is work challenging or boring?; are jobs tightly defined as produce routines or do they provide flexibility?),
focus of support and rewards (e.g., what aspects of performance are appraised and rewarded?; what projects and actions/behaviors get supported?).

2.3 What is the difference between explicit and implicit culture?

Explicit culture represents the typical patterns of behavior by the people and the distinctive artifacts that they produce and live within. Implicit components of culture refer to values, beliefs, norms and premises, which underline and determine, the observed patterns of behavior.

2.3 The degree to which a change in implicit culture can occur is dependent ton the strength of culture. The strength of culture depends primarily on two things:

(1)Pervasiveness of the norms beliefs and behaviors in the explicit culture (the
proportion of members holding strongly to specific beliefs and standards
of behaviors).
(2)Match between the implicit and explicit aspects of culture.

2.3 Another way of looking at culture is in terms of cultural norms. Essentially, norms vary along two dimensions:

(1) The intensity – amount of approval/disapproval attached to an expectation; (2) Crystallization – prevalence with which the norm is shared. It is only when
there exist both intensity and crystallization (or consensus) that strong
cultures exist.

2.3 What are the 4 cultural traits and values identified by Dennison & Mishra (1995) that are associated with cultural effectiveness?

Involvement
Consistency

However, it can have both positive (provides integration and coordination) and negative (highly consistent -> resistant to change) organizational consequences.

Adaptability, or the capacity for internal change in response to external conditions
Sense of mission or long-term vision

A mission provides purpose and meaning, and a host of non-economic reasons why the organization’s work is important.

2.3 Organic structures promote innovation. What are examples of organic structures?

Freedom from rules, participative and informal, many views aired and considered, face to face communication, little red tape, inter-disciplinary teams, breaking down departmental barriers, emphasis on creative interaction and aims, outward looking, willingness to take on external ideas, flexibility with respect to changing needs, non-hierarchical, information flow downwards as well as upwards.

2.3 Mechanistic structures hinder innovation. What are examples of mechanistic structures?

Rigid departmental separation and functional specialization, hierarchical, bureaucratic, many rules and set procedures, formal reporting, long decision chains and slow decision making, little individual freedom of action, communication via the written word, much information flow upwards, directivesflow downwards.

2.3 Does culture hinder or enhance the process of creativity and innovation?

It simply depend on the norms that are widely held by the organisation. If the right types of norms are held and are widely shared then culture can activate creativity.

2.3 What are important norms that can activate creativity? (14)

challenge & belief in action (employees' involvement in daily operations)
freedom and risk-taking
dynamism and future orientation
external orientation
trust and openness
debates
cross-functional interaction and freedom
myths & stories (degree to which success stories are designed and celebrated)
Leadership commitment and involvement
Awards and rewards (manner in which successes (and failures) are celebrated and rewarded)
Innovation time and training
Corporate identification and unity
organisational structure - autonomy and flexibility

2.3 Corporate missions, philosophy statements & innovation culture: what makes a philosophy statement effective? According to Ledford et al. (1994), an effective statement consists of four basic guiding principles to bring a statement to life:

(1)Make it a compelling statement. Avoid boring details and routine
descriptions.
(2)Install an effective communication and implementation process.
(3)Creates strong linkage between the philosophy and the systems governing
behavior.
(4)Have an ongoing process of affirmation and renewal.

2.3 In order to build a successful and sustainable culture of innovation, leadership needs to accomplish two broad tasks:

Leaders need to be acutely sensitive to their environment and acutely aware of the impact that they themselves have on those around them.
Leaders need to have the ability to accept and deal with ambiguity. Tolerance of ambiguity allows space for risk taking, and exploration of alternative solution spaces, which do not always produce business results.

2.3 Characteristics that distinguish highly innovative firms against less innovative companies are as follows: (4 points)

Top management commits both financial and emotional support to innovation.
Top management has to ensure that realistic and accurate assessments of the markets are made for the planned innovation. Highly innovative firms are close to the end users, and are accurately able to assess potential demand.
Top management ensures that innovation projects get the necessary support from all levels of the organisation.
Top management ensures that structured methodology/systems are set in place so that each innovation goes through a careful screening process prior to actual implementation.

2.3 Actions that need to be addressed in order for the empowerment to contribute to innovation: (5 points)

Establish meaningful ‘actions’ boundary: Successful companies need to draw ‘actions’ boundary through a process of explicitly defining the domain of action and the priority, and the level of responsibility and empowerment provided to reach these ends.
Define risk tolerance
Structure involvement
Accountability: A very common problem in empowered innovation is that everyone is encouraged to participate in cross-functional process involvement, to an extent that almost everybody loses track of who is accountable for what.
Action orientation rather than bureaucracy orientation

2.3 Key distinguishing factor between innovative and less innovative firms is the ability of management to create a sense of...

… a sense of community in the workplace. Highly innovative companies behave as focused communities whereas less innovative company units behave more like traditional bureaucratic departments.

2.3 What are the two types of autonomy in innovative firms?

(a) strategic autonomy – the freedom to set one’s own agenda,

(b) operational autonomy – the freedom to attack a problem, once it has been
set by the organization, in ways that are determined by the individual self.

Operational autonomy encourages a sense of the individual and promotes entrepreneurial spirit, whereas strategic autonomy is more to do with the level of alignment with organizational goals. What works best is a balance between operational and strategic autonomy!

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Leaderschip & organization

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