CREATIVITY ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: THE INFLUENCE OF CULTURE AND MULTICULTURALISM ON CREATIVITY

In a world that is constantly becoming more global, complex and dynamic, organizations, face great challenges and are required to offer new solutions. Creativity is crucial to organizations’ successful performance since a new product, process or a service enables a competitive advantage. Nonetheless, engaging in creativity carries the risk of rejection or criticism and the potential to lose business from clients. The risk of being rejected or embarrassed may discourage employees from coming up with new ideas. Therefore it is important to identify the factors that encourage and facilitate creativity at work. Previous research found that trust and support from supervisors, colleagues and even costumers, increases employees` creativity, such as an organizational culture of tolerance for mistakes. Since organizational culture was found to influence creativity. One can assume that culture at a broader level of analysis such as national culture will affect creativity. Yet, only recently the relationship between culture and creativity has started to draw researchers’ attention, and overall the findings are rather inconsistent.

My research has contributed to enrich the knowledge on culture and creativity by examining the following questions: is creativity universal or culture-specific? Are people from different cultural backgrounds differ in their creative abilities or habits? Are people from different cultural backgrounds that work together can be creative together collaboratively? How does the influence of work context (such as the presence of supervisors or colleagues) on creativity vary in different cultures?