An Exploratory Study On Organizational Creativity Result From Organizational Political Behavior In Chinese Firms

In the context of economic transition from "made in China" to "created in China" Companies begin to explore how to shape and promote the organizational creativity in order to enhance the core competitiveness. With market competition increasing and the market environment changing, the organizational creativity has become the maintain means for the organizations to survive and obtain long-term development. Thus, Organizational creativity have become the focus of academic field and enterprise managing practice. Exploring how organizational creativity generated in daily organizational activities is importance for the organizational creativity research and the sustainable development of enterprises.Creative achievements are often generated in daily interpersonal interaction in organizations. Influenced by Confucian culture, the Chinese enterprises more emphasis on hierarchic difference and the maintenance of this hierarchic order, which inevitably bring about political behavior in social interaction. How organizational creativity generated in the social interactions under this culture background?This paper explored the generation mechanism of organizational creativity from the perspective of organizational political behavior by case study. The data comes from interviews and ethnography. We interviewed four companies and tracked a company nearly5months. In the data analysis stage, I use both grounded theory and discourse analysis. First, I coded the interview data of four companies by grounded theory to recognize the connotation of organizational political behavior and organizational creativity. Then, I analyze how organizational creativity generated from the daily interpersonal interaction in organizations from the perspective of each organizational political behavior through discourse analysis of ethnographic material.Organizational political behavior often occurs in trading behaviors based on the organizational resources given by the formal structure and networking based on individuals’ social belonging needs. This paper found the three kinds of situations in which organizational political behavior mainly occurs through the case study, which are the superiors to subordinates,the subordinates to superiors, and colleagues to colleagues. In particular, leadership promotes organizational creativity by influencing the exploratory efforts of employees, employes striving to become the indispensable talents promotes the generation and application of creativity, abusing of authority,currying favor with the superior and the political struggle among colleagues inhibit creative activities through deplet creative resources. Networking and interpersonal skill between colleagues can stimulate creativity through utilize and mobilize the resources by informal ways to engage in creative activities.