1 Introduction

Connecting Creative Leadership’s Strands of Research

Charalampos Mainemelis, Olga Epitropaki, and Ronit Kark

Introduction

The concept of creative leadership was introduced in the 1950s by Selznick (1984) in an attempt to differentiate the more generative manifestations of leadership from both technical administration and artificial intelligence systems (Stark, 1963). By 2018, creative leadership has become more important and relevant than ever before. With the advent of the global, digital, and knowledge-based economy, leaders require creativity in order to build and develop adaptive organizations. Moreover, as creativity and innovation are now business imperatives for many types of organizations, the ability to foster the creativity of employees has become an important aspect of many leadership jobs. Furthermore, the explosion of creative industries has created a vast sector of economic activity in which the notion of leadership is often virtually indistinguishable from the notion of creative leadership. Last, but not least, as breakthrough advancements in artificial intelligence threaten to render many traditional forms of management obsolete, creative leadership becomes increasingly important as a source of some cardinal leadership qualities that intelligent machines do not possess (at least not yet), such as the ability to solve creatively highly complex social problems.

Recently, we proposed a metatheoretical integration of research on creative leadership conducted between 1957 and 2014 (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). We observed that research on creative leadership has grown substantially in the last 15 years and that various streams of organizational, psychological, and sociological inquiry have examined the relationship between creativity and leadership, albeit using slightly different names such as ‘creative leadership’, ‘leading for creativity and innovation’, and ‘managing creatives’. We found that across all strands of research creative leadership refers to leading others toward the attainment of a creative outcome. However, different research strands tend to give different meanings to what it actually means to lead others toward the attainment of a creative outcome.

We identified in the literature three conceptualizations of creative leadership that are not mere artifacts of diverse paradigmatic or methodological choices, but rather, they reflect actual differences in the enactment of creative leadership across organizational and social contexts. Moreover, these three conceptualizations are not exclusive properties of any given research strand, but rather, each conceptualization underlies the intellectual efforts of two or more research strands in the organizational and larger social science literature.

We observed that across all social and work contexts where the production of work is collaborative and non-solitary, creativity depends not only on one or more individuals’ creative contributions, such as generating and refining new ideas, but also on other people’s supportive contributions, such as providing psychological, social, and material support for creativity. Although supportive contributions do not constitute creative contributions, past research has consistently shown that they play a pivotal role in stimulating and sustaining the creative performance of other members in the collaborative context (e.g., Amabile et al., 1996, 2004; Koseoglu, Liu, & Shalley, 2017; Lin, Mainemelis, & Kark, 2016; Madjar, Oldham, & Pratt, 2002; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Zhang & Bartol, 2010). The three conceptualizations that we discerned in the extant body of research differ primarily in terms of the relative ratios of the creative and supportive contributions that leaders and followers make in the creative process in contextually patterned ways. We integrated these conceptualizations into a metatheoretical framework of three collaborative contexts of creative leadership: Facilitating employee creativity; Directing the materialization of a leader’s creative vision; and Integrating heterogeneous creative contributions, as shown in Figure 1.1.

The first conceptualization, Facilitating, focuses on the leader’s role in fostering the creativity of followers in the organizational context. In Facilitative contexts, leaders are expected to make more supportive contributions, on balance, so that followers can make in turn more creative contributions to the final work product. In such contexts, higher degrees of creative leadership refer to higher degrees of leader supportive contributions, which, all other things being equal, result in higher degrees of follower creative contributions. This conceptualization was originally developed within a social-psychological strand of organizational creativity research that examines contextual influences on employee creativity, and later it expanded into a strand of leadership research that examines the influences of various leadership styles on employee creativity. These two research strands focus on how leaders foster or hinder employee creativity, and they have been the most prolific contributors to creative leadership research to date (e.g., Amabile et al., 2004; George & Zhou, 2007; Liao, Liu, & Loi, 2010; Lin, Mainemelis, & Kark, 2016; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Mumford et al., 2002; Shin & Zhou, 2003, 2007; Tierney, Farmer, & Graen, 1999; Zhang & Bartol, 2010).

The second conceptualization, Directing, portrays the creative leader as the primary source of creative thinking and behavior (e.g., Sternberg, Kaufman, & Pretz, 2003). In Directive contexts, followers are expected to make more supportive contributions so that the leader can make in turn more creative contributions. In such contexts, higher degrees of creative leadership refer to higher degrees of leader creative contributions, which all other things being equal, depend on the leader’s ability to inspire and elicit higher degrees of follower supportive contributions. Creative leadership in Directive contexts refers, therefore, to materializing a leader’s creative vision through other people’s work. This conceptualization has been associated with research conducted in contexts where the leader is an institutional entrepreneur or otherwise a master-creator who both creates and manages his or her creative enterprise. This conceptualization of creative leadership is evident in three strands of research that have produced a set of case studies of creative haute cuisine chefs (e.g., Bouty & Gomez, 2010; Gomez & Bouty, 2011; Stierand, 2015; Svejenova, Mazza, & Planellas, 2007; Svejenova, Planellas, & Vives, 2010), a set of studies on orchestra conductors (e.g., Hunt, Stelluto, & Hooijberg, 2004; Marotto, Roos, & Victor, 2007), and a set of studies on creative leadership in the context of top-down corporate innovation (e.g., Eisenmann & Bower, 2000; Vaccaro et al., 2012).

Figure 1.1 The Multi-context Model of Creative Leadership

(Reproduced with permission from Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015: 401)

The third conceptualization, Integrating, focuses on the leader’s role in integrating his or her creative ideas with the diverse creative ideas of other professionals in the work context. In Integrative contexts, both leaders and followers are expected to make high degrees of both creative and supportive contributions. However, as these inputs are heterogeneous, the creative leader is charged with the responsibility of synthesizing them into a final creative product. In such contexts, higher degrees of creative leadership refer to higher degrees of creative synergy among the leader’s (or multiple leaders’) creative vision and the heterogeneous creative contributions of other members of the collaborative context. This conceptualization is evident in a stream of studies on creative leadership in cinematic (e.g., Coget, Haag, & Gibson, 2011; Epitropaki & Mainemelis, 2016; Mainemelis & Epitropaki, 2013; Perretti & Negro, 2007), theatrical (e.g., Dunham & Freeman, 2000), and television settings (Murphy & Ensher, 2008); a second stream of social network studies on creative leadership in the form of creative brokerage in music production (e.g., Lingo & O’Mahony, 2010), industrial design (e.g., Obstfeld, 2012), and museum settings (e.g., Litchfield & Gilson, 2013); and a stream of research on dual (e.g., Hunter et al., 2012; Sicca, 1997) and shared (e.g., Davis & Eisenhardt, 2011; Hargadon & Bechky, 2006; Harvey, 2014; Harvey & Kou, 2013) forms of leadership.

An alarming observation that emerged from our metatheoretical integration of research is that the sharing of scientific knowledge and insight has been highly constrained and even nonexistent among research strands that embrace different conceptualizations of creative leadership. We believe that each of these research streams has made important independent contributions to our understanding of creative leadership, to date. We also believe, however, that each of these research streams has something valuable to gain from increasing its exposure to the research questions, conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches, and conclusions of other strands of creative leadership research. By bringing together in this edited volume exemplar contributions from each of these bodies of work, we seek to trigger fertile exchanges and novel recombinations of knowledge about creative leadership.

The book is organized in four parts. Part I, Foundations of Creative Leadership, entails two chapters (following the present one) that discuss aspects of creative leadership that generalize across all contexts. Part II, III, and IV includes chapters that focus on creative leadership in, respectively, Facilitative, Directive, and Integrative contexts. Next, we provide a brief overview of each chapter in the volume.

Part I: Foundations of Creative Leadership

Following this chapter, which briefly introduces the multi-context model, Chapter 2 argues that creative leadership research should pay more attention to the role of contextual variability. In Chapter 2, Charalampos Mainemelis suggests that, despite the fact that the manifestations of creative leadership vary substantially across contexts, creative leadership research is still troubled by low degrees of contextual sensitivity. He observes that although both styles and contexts exert significant influences on the emergence, unfolding, and consequences of creative leadership, to date research has over-emphasized the role of contextually invariable styles and has sidelined the role of variable contexts. He suggests that while increasing the degree of contextualization of future research is a question of revisiting the way that we build theories and design empirical studies in the field, increasing the field’s general level of awareness of the importance of contextual variability requires a metatheoretical approach of systematically comparing and synthesizing the similarities and differences observed across a number of studies that are conducted in different contexts.

Mainemelis proposes that the tripartite multi-context model can be used as a metatheoretical tool for revealing significant patterns of contextual variability in creative leadership research. Drawing on past research on the role of context in organizational research in general and in leadership research in particular, he discusses what constitutes context in creative leadership; its levels, dimensions, and configurations; and the main organizational sources of contextual variability that affect the manifestation of creative leadership.

In Chapter 3, Olga Epitropaki, Jennifer Mueller, and Robert Lord observe that in the socio-cognitive domain of leadership perceptions and schemas, leadership and creativity remain not only separate but also contradictory notions. Examining points of convergence and divergence in established Implicit Leadership and Implicit Creativity Theories (ILTs vs. ICTs), they observe that despite certain trait similarities between ILTs and ICTs (such as ‘intelligence’), a substantial number of traits are different or even antithetical. They note that this is true especially about traits related to the dark side of creativity, such as ‘disobedient’, ‘poor at business’, and ‘extreme’, that are contradictory to notions of leadership that highlight ‘decision making’, ‘structure’, and such traits as ‘decisive’, ‘hard-working’, ‘helpful’ and ‘understanding’.

Epitropaki, Mueller, and Lord suggest that connectionist models proposed in the ILTs literature offer a pathway to convergence as they highlight the context-sensitive, dynamic, and flexible nature of schemas and allow for both stability and flexibility of implicit theories. They reason that creativity will be automatically activated as a salient trait of leadership in organizational contexts where creativity is a desired quality, innovation is a key strategic objective, positive emotions prevail, and organizational actors see themselves as creators. They suggest that this is more likely in Directive and Integrative creative leadership contexts, where the leader has a strong creator identity, visible creative contributions, and creativity and innovation are key strategic objectives of the work contexts. They also note that they expect little convergence between creativity and leadership in Facilitative contexts of creative leadership where there is limited requirement for creative contributions on behalf of the leader.

Part II: Creative Leadership in Facilitative Contexts

In Chapter 4, Michael Mumford, Colleen Durban, Yash Gujar, Julia Buck, and Michelle Todd make three observations that are indispensable to understanding the progress that research in Facilitative contexts of creative leadership has made during the last 20 years. First, they remind us that, to the surprise of many, an early literature review by Mumford et al. (2002) concluded that effective leadership is strongly related to the initiation and success of creative efforts in firms. Second, they suggest that while it has traditionally been thought that leaders of creative efforts do not themselves need to be especially creative, more recent research suggests that this assumption is not well founded. Finally, they argue that, while the field has assumed that if one could lead elsewhere, one could also lead creative efforts, their present work in Chapter 4 contradicts this assumption.

Building upon an earlier model proposed by Mumford and his colleagues, Mumford, Durban, Gujar, Buck, and Todd focus in Chapter 4 on three dimensions of functions that creative leaders must execute: leading the work (which includes scanning, theme identification, project creation, planning, mission definition, evaluation and feedback, monitoring, and learning), leading the people (which includes team formation, climate creation, and follower interactions), and leading the firm (which entails resource acquisition, support acquisition, and expertise/technology importation). Next, Mumford, Durban, Gujar, Buck, and Todd identify five sets of skills that creative leaders must possess in order to execute these functions effectively: creative thinking skills, forecasting, causal analysis skills, constraint analysis skill, and wisdom. Reflecting on the number and complexity of these functions and skills, they conclude with an important observation: that leading creative efforts may be one of the most—if not the most—demanding forms of leadership in organizations.

While Chapter 4 focuses on the functions and skills leaders must possess in order to lead effectively creative collectives, Chapter 5 focuses on the different ways or styles leaders may employ in order to foster the creativity of others. In Chapter 5, Christina E. Shalley and G. James Lemoine observe that leadership may be the most examined contextual predictor of creativity in the extant literature, and that the related findings have been fairly consistent across empirical studies. Shalley and Lemoine offer a critical review of research on the relationship between leadership behaviors and employee creativity. They discover in the literature five main categories of leadership styles and behaviors that influence followers’ creativity: transformational, charismatic, and transactional; participative (which includes participative, inclusive, and empowering leadership); power focused (authoritative and directive); moral/immoral (authentic, ethical, servant/abusive); and a final category that includes general leadership behaviors not connected to style. Shalley and Lemoine discuss several moderating or otherwise intervening conditions in all five categories. They conclude that participative, transformational/charismatic, moral, and general approaches all positively predict creativity, whereas more authoritarian, directive, and abusive behaviors suppress employee creativity.

Shalley and Lemoine emphasize that, given that the field has long assumed that creativity is infrequent or even rare, it seems contradictory to conclude that virtually anything a leader does fosters employee creativity. In order to shed light on this paradox, Shalley and Lemoine offer three possible explanations: first, creativity may not be as rare as the field has thought, especially in contexts where most cases of employee creativity represent incremental forms of creativity. The second explanation is a methodological halo-like effect, where evaluations of leaders’ behaviors inadvertently tap creative characteristics or processes themselves. A third explanation is that the outcomes of leadership and the antecedents of creativity are very similar. Shalley and Lemoine conclude that all three views have some merit, and they urge future research to focus more sharply on whether, when, and under which conditions a specific leader behavior might impact followers’ creativity.

Chapter 6 focuses sharply on one of the leadership behaviors reviewed in Chapter 5, empowering leadership. In Chapter 6, Xiaomeng Zhang and Ho Kwong Kwan observe that, despite the fact that contemporary work organizations rely increasingly on team creativity in an attempt to stay competitive in the global marketplace, to date most research on the relationship between empowering leadership and employee creativity has been conducted at the individual level of analysis. In order to address this issue, Zhang and Kwan present in their chapter an empirical study about the relationship between empowering leadership and team creativity in the context of R&D teams in an information technology organization in China.

Building upon Amabile’s (1988) componential model of creativity and Yukl’s (2013) contingency perspective of leadership, Zhang and Kwan develop and test a conceptual model that links empowering leadership to team creativity via three intervening mechanisms: team creative efficacy, team learning behavior, and team task complexity. They find that empowering leadership is positively associated with team creativity; that this relationship is mediated by team creative efficacy and team learning behavior; and that these relationships are moderated by team task complexity. Zhang and Kwan conclude that empowering leadership facilitates cooperation among team members in acquiring task-relevant knowledge (i.e., team learning behavior); creates favorable conditions that promote team members’ shared belief in their ability to produce something new and useful (i.e., team creative efficacy); and has a greater impact on team processes, emergent states, and outcomes when teams face demanding situations (e.g., high level of task complexity), which require team leaders to play a greater role.

While Chapter 6 examines the role of team task complexity as a link in the relationship between leadership and team creativity, Chapter 7 examines another dimension of team complexity, namely team diversity. In Chapter 7, Maria Kakarika observes that, to date, research on diversity has been propelled by four theories that focus on diversity as information processing, as social categorization, as disparity/(in)justice, and as access to external networks. She also observes that many studies on the relationship between diversity and creativity have yielded inconsistent empirical findings. Kakarika argues that these mixed results indicate the need to craft more complex models, by paying greater attention to the selection of the appropriate diversity variable among various available diversity variables, and by paying attention to the mechanisms through which diversity achieves its effect on creativity.

Building upon a recently introduced metatheoretical framework of team diversity (Mayo et al., 2017), Kakarika develops in Chapter 7 a conceptual framework of creative leadership in the context of diverse teams that takes into account complex interactions among various dimensions of diversity and specifies different leader behaviors that can channel diversity into higher degrees of creativity. She suggests that while in social categorization contexts leaders may foster creativity by engaging in emotional conflict management and by creating a superordinate group identity, in information-processing contexts leaders may foster creativity by enabling information flow and promoting healthy degrees of cognitive conflict. In addition, while in disparity contexts leaders may foster creativity by engaging in emotion management and by reducing feelings of injustice, in variety of access contexts leaders may foster creativity by allowing the team to connect with various external sources of information and political support. Kakarika concludes by offering three general guidelines that integrate the mutually enforcing effects of the four diversity contexts.

Part III: Creative Leadership in Directive Contexts

In Chapter 8, Robert J. Sternberg reminds us that, because creativity has dark and potentially disastrous sides, what matters is not only whether creativity is used but also how it is used. He suggests that creativity is important for effective leadership because it is the component whereby one generates the ideas that others will follow. A leader who lacks creativity, writes Sternberg, may get along and get others to go along, but he or she may get others to go along with inferior or stale ideas. At the same time, Sternberg argues that creativity may be a necessary but not sufficient condition for great leadership. Considering that leaders often fail because they lack ethics rather than creativity or intelligence, Chapter 8 poses the question, what characteristics, in addition to creativity, are needed in order to protect against dangerous leaders?

Sternberg discusses this question in relation to the WICS (wisdom, intelligence, creativity, synthesis) model that he and his colleagues have developed over the years. He argues that leadership that is both good and effective is in large part a function of creativity in generating ideas, analytical intelligence in evaluating the quality of these ideas, practical intelligence in implementing the ideas and convincing others to value and follow them, and wisdom to ensure that the decisions and their implementation help to achieve a common good for all stakeholders. Sternberg discusses ten main elements of a creative attitude toward leadership; eight types of creative leadership contributions; academic and practical components of intelligence; the role of wisdom in leadership; and the synthesis among the wisdom, intelligence, and creativity components.

While Chapter 8 makes use of a few high-magnitude examples of creative leadership in politics (e.g., Nelson Mandela), Chapter 9 focuses on high-magnitude cases of creative leadership in haute cuisine. In Chapter 9, Isabelle Bouty, Marie-Léandre Gomez, and Marc Stierand observe that the majority of past theories and empirical studies in the field have focused on how the average person engages creatively with a task in a work context that usually does not depend primarily on creativity. Drawing on and aggregating the insights that each one of them has accumulated over the years from conducting empirical research in the field of haute cuisine, Bouty, Gomez, and Stierand propose a theoretical foundation that is more sensitively attuned to the practices of highly creative leaders in work contexts requiring substantial degrees of creativity. Their data-driven reflexive interpretation of their past empirical investigations carries special weight, considering that over the years the three of them have penetrated in unusually deep and prolonged (for researchers) ways into the reality of the creative practices, chefs, teams, and organizations that constitute the world of haute cuisine.

Following a reflexive transversal analysis, Bouty, Gomez, and Stierand suggest that chefs direct their team through enabling (configuring the creative space to set the conditions of creative work), orientating (managing creative work to keep it abounded and focused), and complying (assessing ideas to select those that fit). The chapter highlights that even though creative chefs rarely perform the necessary legwork of creative production themselves, they strictly control it to be in line with their overall creative vision. Bouty, Gomez, and Stierand argue that the three creative leadership practices of enabling, orientating, and complying are interrelated in nonlinear, non-stable, and often ‘fuzzy’ ways.

While Chapter 9 focuses on exceptional creativity in the field of haute cuisine, Chapter 10 focuses on exceptional creativity in the arts. In Chapter 10, Silviya Svejenova observes that whereas original forms of expression may abound in the arts, radical innovation is rare and hard to foresee. She argues that in the context of artistic innovation the emphasis is less on leading others and more on leading time. Svejenova poses the question, “how does creative leadership unfold in time in contexts of artistic innovation?” The purpose of her chapter is to explore not merely the long-term effects of creative leadership, but, most importantly, the connection between structural and dynamic aspects of time in the emergence and stabilization of novelty, and its materialization into a ‘creative world’, a distinctive universe of signs and symbols that is fertile and hence able to inspire future generations of audience and creators.

Svejenova explores empirically these issues through an analysis of the case of Joan Miró, who is recognized as one of the greatest art innovators of the 20th century for establishing a novel visual language and aesthetics. Her analysis distinguishes between two different enactments of Miró’s creative leadership: time patterning, the temporal infrastructure of the artist’s creative practice that entails different tensions; and temporality work, which involves cultivating serendipity and surprise, extending events’ duration, stepping into new temporalities, and considering potentiality. Svejenova argues that time patterning provides a scaffolding for steady creative work and experimentation, whereas temporal work ensures the materialization of a creative world of novel signs, symbols, and forms.

Part IV: Creative Leadership in Integrative Contexts

In Chapter 11, Sarah Harvey, Chia-yu Kou, and Wenxin Xie observe that although creative groups face a variety of coordination challenges, past research has often studied them as if they were leaderless. Building on a recent model that describes collective creativity as a process of creative synthesis (Harvey, 2014), Harvey, Kou, and Xie discuss in their chapter how creative leaders can shape and help materialize a vision by drawing out and then enabling integration of group members’ diverse inputs. Their process model of leading for creative synthesis consists of three phases: marshaling resources, helping groups to engage in the process facilitators through leader behaviors (which includes inciting action for enacting ideas, directing collective attention, and identifying overlaps for building on similarities), and facilitating feedback from the external environment.

Harvey, Kou, and Xie’s model departs from past research in notable ways. Instead of emphasizing how leaders can set the vision themselves (as it is usually the case in Directive contexts), or how leaders can create an environment where many diverse new ideas arise from followers (as it is usually the case in Facilitative contexts), the model that they present in Chapter 11 focuses on how leaders use constraints, boundaries, and other variability-reduction practices to help the group generate and integrate ideas. Moreover, by defining creative synthesis as a dialectic process in which group members integrate their diverse inputs to develop a shared understanding of a task, their model places a strong emphasis on collective leadership and on what individual leaders can do to enable collective leadership.

While Chapter 11 examines creative leadership in less dispersed and more temporally stable organizational groups, Chapter 12 examines creative leadership in the context of shorter creative projects undertaken by temporary and dispersed networks of heterogeneous professionals. In Chapter 12, Elizabeth Long Lingo notes that in Integrative contexts creative leadership requires generating, eliciting, and synthesizing new ideas into a cohesive whole; it involves the formation of a constellation of creative content contributors from across a network as opposed to a single organization or unit; and it often lacks formal authority over those involved. She also observes that in such contexts creative leaders face three types of ambiguity: ambiguity over quality, or what constitutes success; ambiguous occupational jurisdictions, or control over decisions or whose expertise should prevail; and ambiguity regarding process, or how the collective creative work should proceed. Lingo argues that integrative creative leaders navigate these tensions by engaging a distinct form of brokerage, creative brokerage, that weaves together both tertius gaudens and tertius iungens approaches in order to manage the three types of ambiguity, elicit creative contributions, and maintain the commitment of those involved.

Building upon the study of Nashville country music producers by Lingo and O’Mahony (2010), Lingo offers in Chapter 12 a focused conceptualization of the role of the integrative creative leader through four primary phases of the collective creative process: resource gathering, defining project boundaries, creative production, and final synthesis. She discusses in detail the key challenge faced by creative leaders in each of the four phases; the key result that triggers the (nonlinear) transition to the next phase; the type and content of the ambiguity present in each phase; and the creative brokerage practices that creative leaders use by combining tertius iugens and tertius gaudens approaches in order to effectively navigate the various tensions, challenges, and objectives.

While Chapters 11 and 12 focus on how creative leaders synthesize their and others’ heterogeneous creative contributions into a final creative product, Chapter 13 focuses on how creative leaders achieve higher level synthesis by rearranging others’ individual creative products into novel creative collections. In Chapter 13, Robert C. Litchfield and Lucy L. Gilson observe that museum curators bring together the creative works of others, aggregate them into collections, and then take samples of these collections and present them as a form of new work labeled exhibitions. The extent that curators themselves are creative does not lie in the individual works, but in the curators’ ability to combine works into a new (novel) and coherent (useful) exhibitions. Using museum curators as an analogy, Litchfield and Gilson propose that curatorial leaders might logically aim to assemble ideas that represent different types of creativity from the perspective of their general business operations, and that alternate framings may serve to alter these creative profiles in ways that can reveal new value propositions.

Elaborating upon their earlier work (e.g., Litchfield & Gilson, 2013; Gilson & Litchfield, 2017), Litchfield and Gilson analyze in Chapter 13 the comparative advantages of curatorial creative leadership over the idea championing and the portfolio management perspectives. They illustrate their arguments with the analytical example of curatorial creative leadership in the context of a boutique hotel chain that seeks to cross-reference ideas collected from employees by domain (e.g., lobby, bar, maid service, guest services/concierge) and creative type (i.e., foolish, disruptive, radical, or breakthrough).

While Chapters 11, 12, and 13 explore commonalities of creative leadership in Integrative contexts, Chapter 14 explores sources of variability among integrative creative leaders. In Chapter 14, Nicole Flocco, Filomena Canterino, Stefano Cirella, Jean-Francois Coget, and Abraham B. (Rami) Shani note that filmmaking is a par excellence Integrative context of creative leadership, where the film director has to elicit, orient, and integrate the highly heterogeneous inputs of multiple non-similar professionals into a coherent whole, the final cut. They observe that while the final cut is a collective effort, the act of integrating heterogeneous inputs itself is not necessarily so: integration could be done solely by the director, in an autocratic manner, or it could be shared with others, in a democratic manner. Flocco, Canterino, Cirella, Coget, and Shani examine the factors that can help explain why different directors occupy different ‘locations’ on the autocratic-democratic continuum. In doing so, they offer a rare juxtaposition of context and styles approaches to studying creative leadership.

Analyzing a range of secondary sources, they contrast and compare the cases of six film directors: Christopher Nolan, George Lucas, John Lasseter, Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, and Richard Linklater. Flocco, Canterino, Cirella, Coget, and Shani conclude that the seven film directors vary considerably in the extent to which they integrate heterogeneous contributions in an autocratic vs. a democratic manner. They also propose seven factors that appear to be associated with this variation: the personalities of the directors, in particular, their apparent need for control; the temporality of involvement of others in crafting the vision (early vs. late); secrecy, or the extent to which directors protect the creative process from others vs. leave it open; directors’ tendency to work with the same crew and cast across different movies or not; consolidation of roles by the director; technology, in particular how high vs. low tech the movie is, as indicated by the extent and complexity of special effects or animation in the filmmaking process; and the organization of the filmmaking process, such as whether rehearsals occur or not, or time is allotted for creative reorientation during the filmmaking.

Discussion

Discovering Similarities

In a recent critical reading of the creative leadership literature, we suggested that the field needs “to develop more nuanced, more accurately bounded, and more synthetic perspectives about creative leadership” (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015: 451). The collection of scholarly contributions in this book responds to this call with a set of nuanced insights about the context, content, emergence, variations, and consequences of creative leadership. We discern four central themes in the contributions that the chapters make: revealing complexity, synthesizing key dimensions, suggesting novel directions, and capturing dynamic processes.

Some chapters analyze the multidimensionality and complexity of creative leadership in relation to contextual variability (Chapter 2), implicit theories (Chapter 3), and leader behaviors (Chapter 5). Some chapters synthesize different aspects related to creative leadership into more complex conceptualizations, including common functions and skills (Chapter 4), types of team member diversity (Chapter 7), and wisdom, intelligence, and creativity (Chapter 8). Some chapters propose novel extensions to our understanding of creative leadership, specifically, from the individual to the team level of analysis (Chapter 6); from short to long time frames (Chapter 10); from idea generation to the assembly of idea collections (Chapter 13); and from focusing on either context or styles to juxtaposing both the context and styles orientations in studying creative leaders (Chapter 14). Last, but not least, some chapters shed light on creative leadership as a fluid and dynamic process of recursive creative practices (Chapter 9), creative synthesis (Chapter 11), and creative brokerage (Chapter 12).

We note next that the collection of chapters reveals important methodological and theoretical differences among different research streams. That said, we invite the reader to consider that most of these differences are not unbridgeable in metatheoretical terms, and that many basic assumptions, definitions, or/and concepts about creativity and leadership are shared by most or all chapters in the book. We believe that it is important to preserve such fundamental commonalities because they are essential to sustaining and developing the intellectual exchange among different research strands.

Discovering Differences

A comparison among the chapters composing Parts II, III, and IV sheds new light on some key differences among the Facilitative, Directive, and Integrative creative leadership contexts that we identified in Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015).

The three chapters in the Directing context set the magnitude of creativity much higher than the chapters in the Facilitating and Integrating contexts. In Chapter 9, Bouty, Gomez, and Stierand identify as a limitation of past research the tendency “to focus more on the average person’s engagement in a creative task rather than on the practices of highly creative leaders.” Their chapter concerns highly creative leaders in haute cuisine. Svejonova as well notes in Chapter 10 that

In order to examine the creation and evolution of radically new forms, aesthetics, techniques, and subject matters that change the world of art, Svejenova analyzes the case of legendary artist Joan Miró. Although Sternberg’s propulsion model identifies creative contributions of variable magnitudes, his discussion in Chapter 8 of “great leadership” points to higher-than-average cases of creative leadership.

In contrast, the chapters in the Facilitating and Integrating contexts do not restrict the magnitude of creative contributions to high levels. For example, in Chapter 13, Litchfield and Gilson discuss a broad range in the degrees of novelty and utility of creative products. Similarly, in Chapter 5, Shalley and Lemoine wonder whether creativity is not “as rare as some have expected” and that “radical creativity might be far less prevalent in organizations than incremental creativity.” If that were true, it would support the conclusion that we reached in Mainemelis, Kark, and Epitropaki (2015): contextual variability is largely responsible for the variability in the approaches, conceptualizations, and findings of research conducted in the three contexts. Put another way, at one extreme, research in the Directing context is selective and studies notable ‘master-creators’ in contexts where radical master-creators exist; at another extreme, research in the Facilitating context is inclusive and usually studies lower magnitude cases of creative leaders and creative employees in a variety of organizations where most creativity is not radical.

Furthermore, the three chapters in the Directive context set the creative leader’s level of responsibility much higher than research in the other two contexts. We note earlier that the notion of creative leadership was introduced in 1957 by Philip Selznick (1984) in his book Leadership in Administration. The concept of creative leadership appears on page 149, in the last subsection of the book titled “Creative Leadership.” A few pages earlier, on page 142, there is the penultimate subsection of the book titled “Responsible Leadership.” The proximity of the two subsections is not accidental: for Selznick, responsible leadership and creative leadership are fundamental components of great leadership and work in unison to create a better, more secure, and more creative future. Among the 14 chapters in this volume, the chapter that comes closer to portraying creative leadership in similar terms is Chapter 8, in which Sternberg suggests that great leadership is leadership that shapes a better future for all:

While the other two chapters in the Directing context do not link creative leadership with the future of the society or the world at large, they associate the actions and decisions of the Directive creative leader with the evolution of the field in which he or she functions, be it haute cuisine (Chapter 9) or the arts (Chapter 10). In contrast, the chapters in the Facilitating and Integrating contexts tend to examine the creative leader’s responsibility and ultimately impact within the boundaries of a specific project (Chapters 4, 11, 12, and 14) or regular, continuous organizational work (Chapter 5, 6, 7).

A corollary issue concerns the time frame used to examine the consequences of creative leadership. At one extreme, Svejenova, in Chapter 10, employs a very long time frame that goes well beyond the life of the creator. Creative leadership, she notes, is about “leading time” by crafting a “creative world” that offers “inspiration for others and, thereby, projects the novel artwork into the future.” In the creativity literature, it is well established that the ultimate value of radical creative products in the arts is better judged in long time frames. Svejenona’s use of a long time frame brings to the field of creative leadership research a fresh angle of leading others indirectly—that is, by inspiring and mobilizing people in the long future through one’s creative work. Although the other chapters in the Directing context do not use such long time frames, we note earlier that they associate creative leadership with the long-term evolution of their respective fields. At another extreme, the chapters in the Integrating context work with the much shorter time frames observed in intense organizational projects (Chapter 11 by Harvey, Kou, and Xie), music production projects (Chapter 12 by Lingo), and filmmaking projects (Chapter 14 by Flocco, Canterino, Cirella, Coget, and Shani). Tellingly, the chapters in the Facilitating context do not have clear time frames as they focus more on continuous organizational activities or/and temporally static relationships among variables.

In addition, the chapters composing this book reveal different preferences for conducting research in permanent or temporary structures. Research in Integrative contexts tends to take place either in temporary organizations, such as music production projects (Chapter 12) and filmmaking projects (Chapter 14), or in temporary projects that take place within permanent organizational structures (Chapters 11 and 13). In contrast, most chapters in the Facilitating (Chapters 5, 6, and 7) and the Directing (Chapters 8, 9, and 10) contexts focus more on ongoing forms of creative collaboration within permanent organizational structures.

Another pattern of differences concerns the relative emphasis given to variance or process approaches to studying creative leadership. Consistent with an earlier observation about the shortage of process-based studies in research in Facilitating contexts (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015), the four chapters in the Facilitating context show the strongest preference for variance-based research, especially Chapter 5 on leadership behaviors (Shalley & Lemoine), Chapter 6 on empowering leadership (Zhang & Kwan), and Chapter 7 on team diversity (Kakarika). Mumford, Durban, Gujar, Buck, and Todd’s model of functions and skills in Chapter 4 as well is based on discrete variables and relationships among discreet variables that are grounded in past variance-based research. However, because their model integrates these variables under an overarching stage-orientated conceptual structure, it could propel in the future the development of more process-based empirical studies. In contrast, chapters in the Directing and Integrating contexts embrace a more pluralistic mix of approaches, and four of them embrace process-based methodologies: Bouty, Gomez, and Stierand’s recursive process model of creative practices in Chapter 9; Svejenova’s dual temporal analysis of Miró’s creative process in Chapter 10; Harvey, Kou, and Xie’s process model of leading creative synthesis in Chapter 11; and Lingo’s process model of creative leadership as creative brokerage in Chapter 12.

Learning From Research in the Other Two Contexts

What could research in each of the three contexts of creative leadership learn from research in the other two contexts? Although there are several things to consider, let us conclude with an intellectually playful note on what research in each context could discover about itself by reflecting on how it looks through the lens of research in the other two contexts.

Seen through the lens of research in the Directing and Integrating contexts, research in the Facilitating context could be described as the static study of anonymous leaders helping anonymous followers to generate anonymous creative products in anonymous organizations, whereby the creativity of the product is usually average, creativity is usually not seen as being very important in the organization, and the study usually focuses on variance-based relationships that have no particular beginning, end, duration, or any other temporal marker. Seen through the lens of research in the Facilitating and Integrating contexts, research in the Directing context could be described as the elitist study of famous creative leaders generating famous creative products in famous creative organizations, whereby the famous creative leaders are members of a small minority of celebrated heroes in a famous creative field, the famous creative field and the famous creative organization are highly atypical of most fields and most organizations in the world, and most of the hard implementation work in the creative process is done by non-famous followers who aspire to become at some point famous creative leaders. Seen through the lens of research in the Facilitating and Directing contexts, research in the Integrating context could be described as a ‘road-trip-story’ type of study about how one or more creative leaders who know how to do well one thing look around for other creative professionals who know how to do well various other types of things so that at some point they can all get together to synthesize their different crafts into a new creative product, whereby the gathering happens in a usually short-lived occasion and takes place within a collaborative context that, more often than not, did not exist the day before and will not exist the day after.

These playful portrayals of the three research orientations are, of course, exaggerated. However, they are not unfounded in empirical reality. They express real differences that, in our view, are systematically generated to a significant extent by patterned differences among the contexts where the three research orientations conduct their studies. From this point of view, the pluralism of orientations in the field of creative leadership research is not merely normal or expectable, but most importantly necessary to capturing the full range of the manifestations of the phenomenon. Equally important is the additional step of connecting metatheoretically the knowledge stocks of these research orientations so as develop broader and more accurate views about creative leadership and its manifestations across different contexts.

Bringing together multiple research strands may also have beneficial implications for their developmental trajectories. Reflecting on the earlier discussion, we believe that the main implication for research in the Facilitating context is the need to embrace more the dimensions of time and temporality, to incorporate more process-based approaches into its theories and empirical designs (e.g., Langley & Tsoukas, 2016), and to pay more attention to the identity and specificity of the people, contexts, and products that it studies. The main implication for research in the Directing context is to become more inclusive and more experimental in its sampling and site-selection methods, so as to better identify and possibly expand the usually narrow limits of the generalizability of its findings. Considering that research in the Integrative context is historically the younger among the three (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015), the main implication for it is related to growing in two directions: working backward to identify what happens in individuals’ creative process before they come together to synthesize their ideas and inputs; and working forward to shed light on the sources of collaborative continuity that may persist among the members of the collective long after the temporary organization or the temporary project within a permanent organization dissolve. We invite the reader to discover that the chapters in this volume offer novel and nuanced insights that can propel the evolution of their respective research streams toward those directions.