Feedback in Creative Processes: Toward a Communicative Action Perspective

Abstract

Research on creativity highlights the role of feedback as a contextual factor that fosters creative performance. However, it advances a rather mechanistic understanding of communication that obscures the specific practices in feedback interactions and their constitutive power in shaping creative performance. In this paper, we develop a framework that conceptualizes how organizational actors interact in communicative feedback processes on creative ideas. By drawing on the theory of communicative action by Jürgen Habermas and Hans Joas’ theory of creative action, we make the case for a more complex and nuanced understanding of organizational creativity as constituted in communication processes. In doing so, we highlight the important but underresearched role of recipients when confronted with creative ideas by delineating the communicative struggles that these actors face in this process. We extend the literature on creativity by introducing a theory of communicative action as a suitable lens to better understand communication processes through which creativity does or does not come into being.