Creativity and business

It’s unfortunate that the terms “creativity” and ”business” are rarely used interchangeably or seen as complements to one another because this significantly undervalues the intrinsic value of creativity in the business world. First, both critical thinking and creativity are employed to spot better new chances that are about to present themselves. These enable us to exploit opportunities in a better way, improves our problem-solving skills, and enhance the company’s overall productivity by giving employees room to explore their areas of expertise and by creating an environment where they feel more at ease to experiment with newer ideas. It also allows us to escape the mantra of tweaking and selling the same products once our business is growing and forces us to transcend the limits we have set for ourselves. Stepping into the process of using critical thinking and creativity as means of innovation in our business, one starts with firstly questioning the established norms. This is done by reevaluating the needs of the market and by finding space for innovation to take place and allowing ourselves to be the initiator of the new way to work the market, for any company to grow it is essential to challenge the status quo and experiment with ideas no matter how big or small. The next step is to ensure that your entire team is on board, this can be done by allowing employees to unilaterally and multilaterally analyze where they see the company going and to enable them to contribute to this process. The important idea to take away here is to understand that for any company’s mission to work, every one of its steps needs to be mission driven. This can only be done when every one of its workers is aware of being a direct stakeholder of the company and the best way to have your employees invested is to have them work as an active mind in the creative processes of the enterprise.

Describe your leadership style regarding Hawthorne Leadership Theory, and discuss how your leadership style contributes to your company’s culture and climate.

Very often in social experimentation, what is discovered is very different from what we set out to find initially and very often the best answer is also the simplest and most obvious one. The Hawthorne leadership theory has a similar history, when researcher set out to understand how much were workers impacted by their surroundings, their initial focus was on factors like lightening and cooling. However when they failed to find a relation between either of these and the workers’ improving productivity, they were forced to focus on a factor they had previously overlooked, this was the amount of attention the workers received. It was established that the amount of attention these workers received was directly proportional to the improvement in their productivity. This theory proves to be one of immense importance to businesses, for it is then a fact that the most important investment for your workers is not a financial investment but an energetic investment. Ultimately, for any company to have higher productivity, it is essential for its employees to feel like an important part of the organization. This is a change brought forth by giving employees more attention and hence motivating them to work better as they were made aware of the fact that their work was now under observation. This is done in our company by creating a work place environment where there is better communication between the employees and the employers which lead to the employees getting regular reviews of their work and helps them develop a healthy improvement pattern. We also ensure regular employee input to make them feel like they have more of a say in the company and that their performance is regularly evaluated and observed. Hence we firmly believe that it is essential for any business leader to be connected to their worker, to observe their work and allow them to perform at ease.

From your experience, how can moral disengagement impact resilience?

The concept of moral disengagement and its effects on different aspects of life including making people more resilient to violence is one which people often fail to acknowledge and comprehend fully. This is brought upon by the fact that as people when we see good or evil we tend to shape our thinking processes to see things on a spectrum comprising entirely of black and white and fail to see that in certain situations of life. People who are otherwise considered to be possessors of sound moral encompasses can also end up indulging in activities of cruelty. This includes, on a personal level, a person justifying harmful means by connecting them to socially justified worthy ends; on an agency level people use the method of sub consciously dividing and diffusing the blames for the harms endured on several entities and hence manage to justify to themselves the means employed. When looking towards the victims, these people manage to justify the actions by convincing themselves of the victims bringing these harms upon themselves after all; in their minds, they managed to dehumanize the victims to the extent that they no longer find themselves capable of imagining the impacts on their victims. It is the act of choosing to change the principles of one’s morality by entities they are interacting with and the act of systematically disenfranchising certain groups of people from attaining the basic right to be treated with the respect and behavior due upon every human being by being just that. Sometimes, moral disengagement is also practiced by advantageous comparison by which a person sees his act as one where he is freeing people of a harmful life. Or one where his actions, while wrong is justified because, in his mind, he is putting the people he is affecting in a better world than the status quo. All of these methods, sometimes deliberately induced and sometimes sub consciously acknowledged are used in acts of corporate fraud, terrorism, and military acts. In the business world examples of moral disengagement exist when we have people hiding facts like the company is losing money rapidly. Such a person may be able to justify this to themselves by claiming to do it because they have to pay their employees and that this is the best for the people working for the company. They might also be able to justify this by only looking at the company as a machine and then view themselves as nothing more significant them parts of that machine. Hence would be able to justify their actions to themselves by claiming that they never had the responsibility to disclose this information in the first place and that they are merely a small part of the company and are not responsible for any moral dishonesty that takes place within the company. This is how the diffusion of responsibility in the organization structure helps these people morally disengage themselves. Lastly, the person can also completely dehumanize the victim. As in instead of seeing them as people being affected, they may not allow themselves to see the end point of their act at all and hence morally disengage the agency of those affected by their action, these victims become merely a statistic in their books. Hence once a person enables themselves to look beyond the boundaries of their morality and become immune to the guilt of the harms inflicted by their acts on other people. The resilience to the violence they are inflicting becomes stronger, and hence the reality that is moral disengagement can lead to some of the most barbaric acts people have managed to justify to themselves.

References

Shepard, J. (1971). On Alex Carey’s Radical Criticism of the Hawthorne Studies. The Academyof Management Journal, 14(1), 23-32.

Egbert, M., & Maxim, H. (1998). Incorporating Critical Thinking and Authenticity into Business German Testing. The Modern Language Journal, 82(1), 19-32. doi:10.2307/328681

Gutzwiller-Helfenfinger, E. (2015). Moral Disengagement and Aggression: Comments on the Special Issue. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 61(1), 192-211. doi:10.13110/merrpalmquar1982.61.1.0192