Abstract:
In this era of business, organisations are operating in a constantly volatile business
environment. This unpredictability demands that organisations remain adaptable through
consistently innovating to retain their competitive edge. Existing organisational management
literature has established that creativity is the root of all innovations. Therefore, it is in the
interest of organisations to establish an organisational culture of creativity. We can see the
value of undertaking such a task through the existing empirical research that explores the
operations and strategies of creative organisations. However, where the literature lacks is
empirical research into how organisations outside the creative industries work to build an
organisational culture of creativity. More specifically, an existing knowledge gap is how senior
leaders make sense of and manage creativity in such organisations. As such, this research
entailed undertaking a pilot study conducting six semi-structured interviews with senior
leaders of a large-scale utilities (a non-creative industry) corporation in New Zealand. This
research unveiled four core tensions leaders faced in shifting towards building an
organisational culture of creativity. The leaders expressed the following four tensions: (1)
Contending with ingrained management practices; (2) Balancing organisational stability and
disruption; (3) Enabling risk in a risk-averse environment and (4) Enabling creativity across
fragmented teams and spaces. This research provides a unique take on organisational
creativity and points to future research that can be undertaken to mitigate these identified
tensions.
