Leading creative people: Orchestrating expertise and relationships

Original publication by Michael D. Mumford, Ginamarie M. Scott, Blaine Gaddis, and Jill M. Strange
In The Leadership Quarterly, Elsevier Science Inc., Volume 13, Issue 6, December 2002, Pages 705-750
Synopsis by Adele Bergstrom CMC '05, Editorial Assistant Leadership Review

Creative and innovative work is more highly valued in today's organizational environment due to the challenges of rapidly changing technology, globalization and new methods of production. Effective leadership is central to developing an organization with innovative solutions. According to Mumford et al., the influence of leaders on worker creativity and innovation has been underestimated in the past because we hold a conception that creative ideas should only be credited to the work of the individual. However, they found that studies indicated a positive correlation between creative output and particular styles of leadership in a real-world setting. Research and development for organizational growth and profitability require high performance from innovative employees under responsive leadership.

Leaders-who must have strong social skills-assist creative workers by giving performance feedback and helping define creative problems and strategies for problem solving. In order to do this, leaders must possess a high level of technical expertise and have well-structured plans for projects that reflect the goals of the organization. The authors propose that transformational and charismatic leadership may boost motivation, and therefore overall creativity. A leader's "sense making activities," which are defined as "the creation and articulation of a shared mental model about the causes and consequences of action," are integral to different stages of problem solving and encouraging collaborative work from a diverse team. In addition to strong communication and coaching skills, effective leaders of creative teams need to possess persuasive skills that are both direct and indirect.

The authors give many propositions about necessary characteristics for leaders of creative people. Three of them are listed below.

Proposition 1: As group tasks become more complex, or more novel and ill defined, a greater premium will be placed on leader expertise and creative problem-solving skills.

Proposition 2: The effective use of influence tactics in creative groups will depend on followers' appraisal of leader expertise.

Proposition 3: Leaders of creative groups will be circumspect about expertise requirements delegating structuring and evaluative activities when they lack requisite expertise.

Through involvement, support, flexibility and capitalizing on diversity, today's leaders of creative people must be able to improvise and apply their wide-ranging skills in an integrative style-which the authors call "a style that permits the leader to orchestrate expertise, people and relationships in such a way to bring new ideas to being." In this leadership style, idea integration, idea structuring, and idea promotion are key elements that facilitate innovative problem solving. Leaders of creative groups must possess substantial technical skill as well as social intelligence, communication and team-leading skills.