Relationship of Managerial Creativity With Demographic Variables

The concept of organizational effectiveness is an important innovation in business management. Initially, organizational effectiveness focused on how well an organization compete, how quickly they bring products to the market, their status in the community, their attractiveness to potential market and their profitability. In other words, organizational effectiveness considers how well an organization performs business. Instead of defining corporate success by a few short-term measures, such as sales or profit, it fostered a holistic long-term perspective. This expanded perspective that resulted from a focus on the overall effectiveness of an organization has become central to corporate survival and success in today’s economy. The focus on people, their performance, innovation and creativity is the professional concern of organizational effectiveness. The current research attempts to define a broad perspective on organizational effectiveness and its relation to managerial creativity. With heightened levels of competition and an uncertain economic environment, many organizations are encouraging their teams to be more creative so as to enhance their competitive edge. In the past, organizations mainly focused on producing in bulk and selling at targeted margin as there were very few competitors and buyers didn’t have significant bargaining power. But with the advancement of technology and globalization, buyers’ power has grown significantly and it is forcing companies to be highly innovative and customer centric. In this backdrop, it becomes quite imperative to deploy all their resources in a way that help them create more value for the customers. This makes it important for managers to adopt a management style that encourages employees to come up with new ideas that can enhance productivity. It is vital that the organization continuously reviews its people, processes and structure. For decades, organizations simply focused on developing ways ofcoordinating and controlling the efforts of a group ofpeople towards the achievement of its broaderobjectives. However, for an organization to be trulycompetitive and successful, it needs to synergize all its resources, functions, and activities with a structure and system that can work well and blend all together. Ingeneral sense, Organizational Effectiveness meansaligning the workplace to the strategic businessinitiatives and earnings. It means ensuring businessagility, enabling your workforce to be adaptable andrespond swiftly to changing market conditions.Organizational effectiveness also means fosteringinnovation and workforce productivity by making iteasier for people to find, reach and collaborate witheach other, and with the right information at the righttime and place and all of this must be done whileoptimizing costs and delivering return on investment.The first step towards understanding organizationaleffectiveness is to understand organizational goals and strategies, as well as the concept of fitting design tovarious contingencies. Organizational goals representthe reason for an organization’s existence and theoutcomes it seeks to achieve. Goals are the desiredfuture state of the organization. The term creativity means different things to differentpeople. To some it is deeply personal, to others aproduct of environments. In fact creativity is not new; it is as old as the mankind is on this earth. The earliestman when started living inside the caves for physicalcomfort-it was a creative act. Then he started usingsharp stone as weapon for hunting and wheels forlifting and carrying it. These are all the creative act ofmankind. In the managerial context creativity can bedefined as creative decision making process of takingthe decision from the newer perspective. Thus, acreative and successful manager will be that managerwho is able to modify and utilize the information in auseful manner. Today, a manager needs to be a guide

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and a coordinator who recognizes the need for and is able to bring out the best in his staff so that they can come up with their own solutions to problems. This requires the managers to be creative.

Majority of the concerns in organizations are attributed to its people as their creativity becomes a determining factor for their effective management. In fact, the focus on people, their performance, innovation and creativity is the professional concern of organizational effectiveness. In this scenario, the managerial creativity possessed by the employees has a bearing on the extent up to which an organization can enhance their productivity and thus effectiveness. So, the researcher identified the present problem more clearly as follows – ‘Organizational Effectiveness and Managerial Creativity - A study of selected Indian organizations’. The current research contributes new knowledge and understanding of the relationship between organizational effectiveness and managerial creativity.

• To study the type of relationship between organizational effectiveness and managerial creativity and;

• To suggest measures for the improvement of organizational effectiveness and managerial creativity.

• To study the factors contributing to organizational effectiveness and managerial creativity;

• To study the relationship of organizational effectiveness and managerial creativity with demographic variables (age, qualification, gender, marital status, hierarchy level etc.)

OBSERVATIONS

• There is no significant difference between the mean score of employees of different age-groups regarding different factors of managerial creativity. To fathom out, it can be said that the respondents of different age–groups have same opinion regarding different factors of managerial creativity.

• The analysis between two groups of employees (married and unmarried) reveals that the

difference is not significant regarding differentfactors of managerial creativity i.e. OverallCreativity, Self-Concept, Initiation, Confidence,Independence, Sensitivity and Sense ofPriority. In conclusion, it can be said that bothmarried and unmarried marital status does notchange the opinions regarding different factorsof managerial creativity.

• Hierarchy-wise analysis shows that thedifference is significant between the mean oftop, middle and executive level of respondentsabout Sense of Priority (MC7) factor ofmanagerial creativity. In other words, top,middle and executive level of employees differin their opinion regarding Sense of Priorityfactor. Also, the difference is not significantregarding rest of the factors of managerialcreativity (Overall Creativity, Self-Concept,Initiation, Confidence, Independence andSensitivity).

• Since no significant difference is found ondifferent factors of managerial creativity whenanalyzed qualification-wise, gender-wise,marital-status wise, and age-wise, therefore itis evident that all the respondents having theabove said personal attributes have the sameopinion regarding different factors ofmanagerial creativity.

• Results indicate that there is a significantdifference between the opinions of employeesof various hierarchy levels on Sense of Priorityfactor of managerial creativity. This is due tothe fact that those higher up in the hierarchyhave the broader organizational goals andperformance of the organization as whole ontheir minds while those on the lower rungs ofhierarchy are more concerned with theperformance of the departments and teamsthey are responsible for including individualtargets. Thus, it is recommended thatorganizations should adopt flexibility in theirworking style, decentralize decision making andmaintain open communication channels forsmooth information flow so that employees canbolster creativity in their respective areas ofresponsibility and ensure long term success fortheir organizations.

 Further, results also indicate that the mostimportant factors of managerial creativity areIndependence and Confidence, while the least

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important dimension is Sense of Priority. This is in line with the suggestion made above. It is further suggested to consider the personal and inherent factors while recruitment, which have cognizable influence an individual’s creativity and therefore, his performance. This brings forth the need for a two-pronged approach – to hire creative people and to foster creativity amongst the ranks. While recruiting, managers should look for people who display a stronger sense of independence and confidence in oneself as these two factors are established pre-requisites for managerial creativity. Secondly, the managers should take necessary steps to nurture these qualities further by providing the new recruits with a conducive environment and ample opportunities to realize their potential. This can be achieved through effective decentralization of decision making, clearly defining the roles, responsibilities and targets and finally, clearly defining the accountability of the employees. Being the key to managerial creativity, these steps will surely have a positive impact on the long term success of the organization, and turn the fortunes of many IT companies in India.

• This research study has established it beyond any doubts that managerial creativity plays an extremely crucial role in enhancing organizational effectiveness in an organization. Additionally, it is evident from the results that an organization’s efforts towards enacting better Human Resource policies go a long way in ensuring its effectiveness. For instance, the results indicate that an organization that understands the effect of offering better career growth opportunities and remuneration structure and a stimulating and transparent environment is bound to be more effective and benefit from enhanced competitiveness as it will have a satisfied and loyal workforce that is confident, flexible, and efficient and is willing to take initiatives. An organization is also bound to benefit if it encourages its managers to be more creative when approaching business issues. The approach towards encouraging managerial creativity should be a holistic one. While at one hand the organization must ensure a conducive environment by offering more autonomy to the managers in decision making and rewarding them on coming up with creative solution to a problem that enhances the organization’s effectiveness and improves upon its competitiveness. At the same time, the

managers must also be made aware that theyare also accountable for the decisions themtake and therefore, reckless creativity shouldbe discouraged. The true potential ofmanagerial creativity in an organization willonly be realized when the entire organizationnot only supports it but also makes it a dailyhabit.

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