Lone Geniuses Or Collaborative Pairs? Formal Role Separation to Enhance Organizational Creativity

Abstract

Drawing from the literature on formal roles and organizational creativity, we tested whether formal role separation between creative and business functions at the top of organizations enhances their creativity and under which conditions such separation has a significant impact. While the “role as resource” approach sees in functional separation a way to combine diverse claims and access various forms of capital, we investigate its link with the generation of novel and useful outcomes. In the setting of high-end fashion houses, we found that when two distinct individuals filled the formal roles of creative director and CEO, organizational creativity was significantly higher. Organizational creativity is especially enhanced in cases of formal role separation when the creative director works on multiple projects because this improves specialization and gives more freedom to creative directors to experiment with novelty. Besides, companies, whose creative director and CEO started working for them at the same time, show superior creativity results. We found no evidence that formal role separation is beneficial for the focal firm’s creativity when its creative director works for multiple companies. Our findings suggest that when companies face multiple goals, like creative organizations, having a clear formal role configuration is beneficial to organizational creativity.