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Background and Purpose
The article A Critical Incident Study of Leaders Inuence on Creativity in Research Groups
written by Sven Hemlin and Lisa Olsson basically investigates howleaders in industrial and
academic conditions encourage research group members to create new ways of doing things. In
this study, the researchers have analyzed various critical incidents by using a modied version of
the critical incident technique so as to collect plausible, reliable and validated results.This article
states that leadership is significant as it assists leaders as well as followers to accomplish tasks
through the new innovation. Here, each and every incident is coded and categorized for
identifying which category deals with which situation in industrial and academic setting.
The main purpose of this study is to examine how group leaders in academic and industrial
research settings stimulate creativity in group members by using different techniques and
situations. This study also gives significance on coding and categorization which not only helps
to reduce the big issues into the smallest one but also helps to bring the meaningful conclusions.
Main Issues
In what way do the research group leaders influence and stimulate creativity in the
group?
How research group members perceive their leaders to stimulate the creativity level of
the group?
Do differences in academic institutions and industry explain the differences in how
research group leaders stimulate group creativity?
What is the reason for the importance of creative incident?
What is the reason for difference in the leadership approach to creativity in universities
and industries?
The above-mentioned issues are importance because creativity plays a key role in todays world.
Amabile & Khaire (2008) highlight the importance of creativity by stating that as competition
turns into a game of who can generate the best and greatest number of ideas, creativity plays a
pivotal role. The leader plays a guiding role in research groups. He/she provides the expertise,
ensures co-ordination assigns tasks and supports the group. Thus it is crucial to better understand
the relationship between leadership and creativity.
Basic arguments made by Author
Previous studies have failed to study leadership as a driver of creativity, so the reason for
conducting this study is to shed more light on a little know area of leadership and creativity
Another reason for conducting the study is that very few evidence exist on the topic in the
area of R&D, this study has been conducted in the field of biomedicine and biotechnology.
So the reason for conducting this study is to explore the relationship between leadership and
creativity in the R&D field


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Methodology
In this article, leader related incidents of creativity were gathered by applying critical incident
technique. In this study, they basically asked research group members of academy and industry
to memorize the recent events they faced when their leader tried to simulate their creativity.
After this when they memorized their current events and incident, they again prepared and asked
three questions to answer in an organized manner. And the questions were as follows: describe
about the situation which was causing to occur an incident? Did this incident/event help you to
implement new ideas and concept in your work if yes, why or why not? Describe the things that
your group leader did to instigate your way of doing things in your work? They conducted this
interview session three times with the research groups but not for those who were in the situation
of not memorizing the more incidents. There was the involvement of the both of the authors in
initial sessions but in the latter sessions only the second author was involved to perform the tasks
by applying tape recorder and completed both tasks. Here, after the completion of each question
and answer session, they have included the plausible and reliable information in their research.
Participants
In this article, either industrial or academic research groups had participated to collect the
reliable and validated information. Here, these groups have been identified by searching a
Swedish biomedical and biotechnical network site and university web pages. To recruit and
select these groups, they had developed criteria such as they should have research knowledge
and background with two members and a leader. When they identified these groups, the group
leader was asked to request these group members to get involved in the research where the
women and men of different nationalities were encouraged to participate. They specifically
asked the leaders to invite men and women of various nationalities. In this study, various
subordinates with varied knowledge and experiences were encouraged by their industrial leaders
to participate and also the academic leaders were requested to instigate their subordinates at
various level of academic seniority. In this study, total of 93 participants had participated out of
which 18 participants were in a situation of not memorizing the past incidents. Thus, in the final
sample, they included total of 75 participants from 34 organizations (33 from industry and 42
from universities). Out of those participants, the participants having doctoral degrees were 54.7%
(university: 47.62%; industry: 63.6%), and 45.3% of the university participants were doctoral
students. The industrial members basically were from engineering background not doctoral
students. In small or starts-up companies which were located nearby Universities having less
than 10 employees, a total of 19 industry participants worked for, a total of 11 industry
participants worked for companies having about 10100 employees and 3 industry participants
worked for a larger company having 110 employees. The university participants who were
involved in this study were doctoral students, post-doctoral students, and laboratory assistants.
There was no gender discrimination in this study as they were having almost equal as such
(50.7% males, 49.3% females), but in the university group the percentage of women was higher
(i.e. 64.3%) and in the industry groups the percentage of men was higher (i.e. 69.7%). In case of
group leaders, 85.3% were having doctoral degrees and the male leaders were 68.0%. The
participants had to come in a group ranging from 2-13 (M = 5.7, SD = 3.2). The participants
from university groups were both larger in number (M = 6.3, SD = 3.2) and older (M = 7.7, SD =
5.0) than the industry groups (M = 3.5, SD = 2.4, t (73) = -2.07, p = 0.042 and M = 4.8, SD =
3.0, t (61.5) = -4.66, p = 0.001).
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Data Analysis
Here, the content analysis was used to identify the categories from the members in five steps.
Firstly, they developed a matrix which had separate column for each of our three questions to
report description of information. Then, the incidents which were relevant to the situations were
involved and the creativity instigating behaviors of the leader were also included. Secondly, the
incidents as per meaning content under tentative category labels were managed and organized for
particular situations. Also in this process, researchers did coding and categorization of the issues,
discussed about issues, and checked each other of coding and categorization during the work
process. Thirdly, they made a decision about which categories to discard and which to select.
Fourthly, they integrated various categorizes in a meaningful way. Finally in the fifth step, they
conducted reliability test to assure that whether our codings and that of a third (independent)
person agreed. Here, Landis and Kochs (1977) classification the agreement was fair for the
reasons (k = 0.33), moderate for the situations (k = 0.52), substantial for the behaviors (k = 0.62).
Also, a total of 153 critical incidents were analyzed by the researchers out of which 62% (N =
95) were reported by university participants and 38% (N = 58) were reported by industry
participants. The incidents reported by industry participants (M = 1.39, SD = 0.97, t (91) = -2.00,
p = 0.049) were less than the done by University participants (M = 1.85, SD = 1.18). Moreover,
in this research, the researchers had calculated binomial p to test whether there is any difference
in the observed number of incidents in the university or industry settings than what was expected
(p < 0.05).
Also in this study, in order to categorize the occurrence of the critical incidents the six situations
such as Research meetings; Supervisor/Expert advice; Professional challenge; Travelling and
new collaborations; Social issues; and Creativity-stimulating techniques had been used as shown
in the table 1 in article where more than 50 percentage of the reported situation was occupied by
research meeting and supervisor/expert advice. While doing the reporting, two situations like
travelling and new collaborations (p = 0.022) and Supervision/Expert advice (p = 0.046) were
reported by university participants. Supervision/Expert advice situations were developed to
handle the issues like how to improve methods and scientific communication and how to
accomplish the tasks. For example, while doing research it was found that the leader had
instigated one of his subordinate to do the things in a new way which he found correct than what
he was previously doing due to which the respondent was satisfied with the way instructed by his
leader. Professional challenge situations were developed to solve the problems related to new
responsibilities while doing the research or handle the tough situation related to teaching and
supervision in the universities. In the same way, research meeting situations were created for
research discussions on current projects, project planning in groups and, at the universities only.
In research meeting also the various activities like strategic decision making at the universities
could be conducted. Similarly, travelling and collaborations situations were created to attend
conferences, make new contacts and have collaboration with visiting researcher groups. Social
issues were used to develop collaborative group research climate by discarding negative climates
for group research in industries and universities. Finally the Creativity-stimulating techniques
were organized to invite, encourage and welcome industrial designer to make sketching
exercises.


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Findings:
1. To lead people successfully, expertise and support must be provided to individuals and
groups. Such providing of expertise and support is found to be most significant leadership
behavior.
2. There exist no significant differences between creative stimulating leader behavior of
university leader and industry leader.
3. It was also found that rewards like gifts, praise and expression of trust motivates follower's
creativity.
4. Although no any significant difference was found between task behavior and relation
behavior, task behavior did occurred more than researchers' assumptions.
5. The creativity stimulating leadership behavior was directed at individuals among university
group members and the same was directed at groups among industry group members.
6. It was also found that a leader initiated get together most likely releases the creativity in
groups compared to imaginative hunches and spontaneous discussions which are insufficient
to flourish creative process.
Main Idea
The main idea of this article is to examine how group leaders in academic and industrial research
settings stimulate creativity in group members. Here, it basically specifies that expertise plays a
significance role to lead the group successfully. It also states that there is no difference in the
creativity stimulating behavior between industrial and academic leaders as the same creativity
stimulating leadership behaviors were recommended for both university and industrial group
members. The leader should focus on planning and get together rather than making spontaneous
discussions which is likely to produce creativity in group by providing rewards like gifts, praise
and expression.
Managerial Implications and Research Implications
Managers can use leadership style to stimulate creativity of their followers in most of the
organization as well as in research as it helps in managing and accomplishing goals by
minimizing the risks and providing intellectual challenges. With the use of leadership, managers
and leaders shall evaluate new ideas and wait until the better ideas occur. The leaders should take
leadership as an opportunity and challenge in both industrial and academic situations so that the
ideas and the alternatives can be generated relevant to the situations, authorities and
responsibilities can be delegated, and appropriated decisions can be made when required. Also,
by using the tools like scientific exchange, research advancing, autonomy and freedom, the
leaders can increase the interaction among the researchers and increase their involvement in
creative process.
This study was basically conducted to show how leadership behavior in knowledge networks
stimulates creativity besides that this study also has highlighted some of the research
implications. In the future, leaders must develop such a knowledge which assists them to
network their leadership influence wide number of research groups. Currently this research only
deals with the creativity of group members reports of leader creativity-stimulating behavior, but
in the future new studies could explore leaders and/or neutral observers reports of creative
leadership behavior. Finally, in the future longitudinal studies of research groups can be
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developed in order to observe the interactions between leaders and group members during
recurrent time intervals through which creative process could be understand better.
Overall Assessment
This research article is significant in the sense it has attempted to conduct a study on a little
researched topic. This study has made significant contributions to the topic, because previous
studies failed to focus on the role of leadership as a driver of creativity. This research was
conducted with the aim of understanding the role of leadership in creativity so the choice of
research-based universities is a good choice. The inclusion of men and women in the study is
also a merit. For determining the reliability of coding reliability check was done which yielded
reliable but low results due to the use of participants own inferences. Another merit of the study
was the use of Binomial p to test the match between observed and expected number of incidents.
Also in the study a comparative examination was done through a consultation with an
independent assessor yielding satisfactory results therefore, increasing the credibility of the
study. The study is further strengthened by the clear explanations of leadership behaviors and
critical incidents thereby making the study easy to understand. Thus, considering all the above
points we can say this research is significant in mentioned terms.

Despite its merits and significance, the study has certain limitations. The study is confined to
Swedish universities only thereby limiting its wide spread generalizability. Furthermore the
leadership style depends greatly on the culture so the confinement to only one country may be a
demerit of the study. For the study the participants were asked only for recent incidents, this may
lead to recency bias thereby hampering the study. Another demerit of the study is that the
incident where the leader hindered creativity has not been studied. Also the responses of the
participants may be distorted by the pressure of their leaders. Therefore future researchers can
overcome these limitations. The study can be replicated in other countries as well. Further all
incidents should be considered, not only recent ones. Future researches can also be expanded to
cover the hindrances caused by leaders and consider other methods of data collection.

Reference:
Amabile. T. M. & Khaire. M. (2008). Creativity and Role of the Leader. Harward Business
Review. Retrieved from: http://hbr.org/2008/10/creativity-and-the-role-of-the-leader/ar/1

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