Organization Development-Creativity

8 Pages 1916 Words

ers to be able to see, and grasp, new opportunities. Globalization, and the competition that accompanies it, further adds to the need for innovation in an entrepreneurial way, and it is argued that employees of tomorrow will be valued more for their ability to create new knowledge than for being able to manage known facts3.

Since introduced by Osborn in 1953, brainstorming has been widely used in industry and business as a technique for idea generation and problem solving. However, in contrast to its popularity stands the result of several studies that consistently show that nominal brainstorming, i.e. the aggregated work of individuals working simultaneously but without contact with each other, outperform group brainstorming. Three main reasons for this have been dentified4:

Firstly, there is evaluation apprehension, which refers to a situation when the group members are reluctant to express their perhaps unpopular or politically incorrect suggestions or poorly developed ideas in fear of being judged or evaluated by peers or managers. Secondly, social loafing occurs when group members intentionally limit their contributions and rely on other group members to do the job. Thirdly and finally, there is the problem of production blocking, for example, the result of group members having to wait for others to finish before they can offer their own ideas. While waiting ideas may become obsolete or forgotten, or, in order not to forget, people concent...