Exploring the effect of climate for creativity on organizational innovativeness

Abstract

Scholars are in agreement that ‘innovation is the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization’. This notion implies intricate interconnections between constructs. However, creativity per se would not lead to innovation. It must be coupled with conducive organizational climate to enable successful innovations. Empirical evidence have shown favorable trend towards this direction. Nonetheless, studies on the relationship between climate for creativity and organizational innovation are scarce and fragmented in nature especially in the context of small and medium firms in Malaysia. A face-to face survey was used to collect data from thirty-six Malaysian SMEs using established instruments adopted from Amabile's KEYS and Wang and Ahmad. Collected data were subjected to data cleaning, editing and transformation prior to data analysis. Both descriptive and inferential statistics were used to describe the data and to test the hypotheses. Process innovation is mostly affected by climate for creativity followed by behavioral, market and product. However, strategic innovation is not affected by climate for creativity. Firms which invested their resources to foster climate for creativity would benefited from higher innovations in various forms.