Creativity has attracted the attention of researchers in a variety of disciplines
including behavioral psychology and management. Within the field of psychology, the focus has
been primarily on the relation between creativity and such individual attributes as
intelligence, knowledge and personality (Barron and Harrington, 1981; Sternberg, 1988; Sternberg
and Lubart, 1991; Weisberg, 1993; and Helson,
1996). In management literature, the focus
has been more on how the creativity emerges from the interaction between the
individual employee and various aspects of management style and work organization. Woodman et al. (1993), for example, see creativity as resulting from the interaction of individual, group
and organizational variables. Amabile et al. (1996) similarly focus on social and
organizational factors arguing in particular that creativity at work is supported by organizational
and supervisory encouragement as well as by a diversity of ideas within the work
group.
Although there has been some work on the cultural or systemic basis of
creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; and Lubart, 1999), prior to Richard Florida's publication of The Rise of the Creative Class (2002), relatively little attention was given to analyzing creativity at
the levels of regions and nations. By putting forward creativity as the driving force of
economic growth, and by presenting the rise of creativity as a general account of the
current transformation of the economy comparable to the knowledge-based economy
hypothesis, Florida's research has done more than any of the more specialized researches to bring
creativity to the forefront of debate in social sciences. Further, in a series of empirical studies focusing
on the relation between investments in human capital, creativity and regional
economic performance, Florida and his co-authors argued that the creative class provides a new
and alternative standard to the level of educational attainment for measuring human capital
in studies focusing on regional development (Mellander and Florida, 2006; and Florida et al., 2008).
In this paper, the focus is on national economic performance. In `the globalizing
learning economy' the rate of change in technologies, markets and institution is high (Lundvall
and Johnson, 1994; and Lundvall, 2001). In such a context, we expect national economies
hosting organizations where skilled employees are able to act on their own to show strong
economic performance. Firms hosting creative workers are both more adaptive and more
innovative. At the end of this paper, we link the frequency of creative work to the innovation
performance of national economics. The preliminary conclusions support the idea of broad definitions
of both national innovation systems and national innovation policy strategies including
the links between forms of work organization and innovation (Lundvall, 2007).
Drawing inspiration from Florida's research as well as from the more specialized
research on creativity in the fields of behavioral psychology and management, we develop a measure
of `creativity at work' and describe how the importance of creativity varies according to
sector and occupational category for the European Union (EU) as a whole. We then, develop
a simple model explaining the likelihood of creativity at work in terms of features of
the employee's work organization, the human resource management policies he or she is
subject to, and such personal characteristics as educational background and years of
working experience. Then, we make use of logit regression analysis to examine differences in
the importance of creative work across the 27 member nations of the EU, and we consider to
what extent these variations in creativity are associated with differences in national
innovative performance. |
