Showing papers on "Organizational identification published in 1974"

Creativity and Organizational Identification in Research and Development Environments

Abstract: During the past decade, an increasing amount of personnel activity has been directed toward the encouragement of creativity and innovation among organizational employees. In an era characterized by rapid advancement in science and technology, many organizations must cope with change as a matter of operational necessity. Awareness and adaptation are often prime requisites of organizational success. To meet the demands of an ever-changing environment, organizations largely rely on the inventiveness and imagination of their research and development staff, who function as their primary change agents. In research and development settings, creativity is facilitated by diversities in organizational climate not typically found in more bureaucratic structures. Characteristics of creative organizations include \"flat\" or adaptive hierarchies, dispersion of power and decision-making, emphasis on intrinsic motivations and rewards, receptiveness of new ideas, and tolerance of non-conformity. In essence, creative organizations differentiate or specialize their activities to meet changing conditions. By its nature, however, such differentiation frequently leads to the generation of ambiguity and/or conflict situations. To overcome the inherent uncertainties associated with differentiated operations, innovative organizations must also provide for integration of organizational effort. One method of integration involves the encouragement of organizational identification behaviors among staff personnel. Organizational identification has been linked to many beneficial organizational outcomes, including unity of effort, goal achievement, and quality of performance.' Such positive outcomes are particularly germane to research and development environments, where competitive practices often create excessive time and performance pressures upon employees. In addition, identified employees are likely to be resistant to personnel \"raiding\" efforts of competitors. Thus, they may serve as a stabilizing factor in organizations, providing a thread of continuity to organizational operations. Therefore, to provide effective means of differentiating and integrating their activities, research and development organizations are likely to provide rewards to employees for both creativity and organizational identification behaviors. An important underlying assumption of such rewards is