Handbook of Corporate Communication and Public ... - Blogs Unpad

when members start sharing personal information,
and group salience is eroded. For the
majority of corporate users, though, the
online medium would be one of many channels
used for communication between participants,
so individual identities would remain
salient and participants’ tendency to conform
or disagree would be as unaffected as if they
were face to face.
Technology that could facilitate creative
thinking is not limited to groupware and the
internet, however. For example, visualization,
an important ingredient of the creative
process, is enhanced by the advent of interactive
3-D virtual image displays, webcams
and increasingly high-resolution flat panel displays.
Furthermore, increasingly sophisticated
computerized knowledge management systems
nowadays provide employees with easy
access to resources and information that add
to their capacity and increase their inclination
to engage in creative thinking. In fact, communication
technology overall provides vitally
increased capacity for the immediate capture
and subsequent sharing of information and
ideas, whether synchronously or asynchronously,
anonymously or allowing for personal
recognition.
In all these ways, far from being cold and
impersonal inhibitors of imagination, communication
technologies provide systems and
channels for organizations and their members
to use their creative potential more fully, by
allowing them to rise above the constraints of
bureaucracy, geography, memory and time.
Collaboration and creative
thinking
While radical creativity may at times depend
on the initiative of an individual, leading
figures in creativity research agree that collaborative
and team processes are essential to
ongoing and consistent practice of creative
thinking by the workforce as a whole. On
the one hand, teams are necessary for pursuing
and developing radical individual
creative initiatives, and on the other hand
they are vehicles for the ‘incremental’ creative
thinking necessary for corporate success,
particularly in organizations with complex,
changing business environments (Amabile
and Gryskeiewicz, 1989; Csiksezentmihalyi
and Sawyer, 1995; Hunt, 2002; Lehrdahl,
2001; Qvale, 1995).
Consequently, communication management
strategies intended to encourage
creative thinking would need to concentrate
on fostering, maintaining and developing
collaborative problem solving, teambuilding
and networking opportunities within – and
outside – the organization. Interestingly,
extensive studies demonstrate that while
win–lose competition has a negative effect on
individual creative performance, competitive
pressure can enhance creative thinking within
teams when that pressure is perceived as
meaningful rather than arbitrary (Amabile,
1996). The reason for this seems to lie in the
energized, cohesive climate created within a
team in the face of a meaningful challenge,
without the stresses associated with individual
evaluation. In other words, a sense of competition
in a collaborative team environment
could work to the creative advantage of an
organization, and need not be assumed automatically
to discount the possibility of accommodating
creative processes within corporate
contexts per se.
Once again, the importance of communicating
a culture of ‘belonging’ is clear. However,
while constant open communication
within and between segments of an
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors