The Turn toward Creative Work

Abstract

In this Academy of Management Collections essay, we curate a set of articles from the Academy of Management family of journals that showcase the evolution of creativity research within organizational scholarship. The articles reveal a shift from the study of creativity exclusively as an outcome to the broader study of the dynamics of “creative work”—efforts to achieve creativity, whether successful or not. The former—creativity as an outcome—represents the critical early, foundational work that legitimized the study of creativity in organizations, brought needed methodological innovations, and established definitional anchors. Our collection provides evidence of an expansion toward the latter—the dynamics of creative work—in recent years. Over time, researchers have focused more on process and relationships, discovering a dynamic interplay. The collected articles are selected not to be exhaustive but to provoke further theoretical and empirical scholarship on creative work as an inclusive umbrella, ideally leading to a broader, more nuanced understanding of the conditions under which varied creative work processes and the outcomes of those processes emerge.