Background and Purpose

The article Creativity- Stimulating Leadership: A Critical Incident Study of Leaders Influence
on Creativity in Research Groups by Sven Hemlin and Lisa Olsson tries to explore how a
creativity stimulating leaders can influence on creativity in research group members in academic
and industrial research settings. It was found that university leaders stimulate creativity in high
degree. For this study, researchers have emphasized on change leadership behavior of leaders
among three leadership behaviors characterized by Yukl, Gordan and Taber in 2002 as task
oriented, relationship oriented or change oriented. Modified version of critical incident technique
is used to collect creative incidents which were content analyzed according to the reported
creative situation and the creativity stimulating leadership behaviors. Further, four types of
creativity stimulating leadership behaviors are also discussed in the study.
The purpose of this study is to know the role of leaders in stimulating creativity in research
group members in two different settings, namely, academic institutions (especially in the field of
biomedicine and biotechnology) and research and development (R&D) department of industries.
Issues
There are mainly two issues that authors have tried to address in this research study. They are:
When and how do research group leaders in universities and industries stimulate
creativity?
Why is the creative incident important?
Arguments
Though importance of good leadership in stimulating creativity and successful innovation in
work groups has been advocated by many scholars, leadership as a driver of creativity, especially
in research and development groups in particular has been seldom studied. So, the researchers
were interested in learning and exploring whether or not institutional borders (particularly,
academic institutions and industry) explain differences in how research group leaders stimulate
creativity.
Leaders are influential in stimulating creativity among their group members using their research
experience and leadership qualities or behavior, but this is not always the case. Thus, the area of
interest of this study is not only on leaders behavior but also the conditions where creative
leadership is effective by collecting creative incidents as perceived and reported in the interviews
with research group members.







References
Hemlin, S., & Olsson, L. (2011). Creativity-Stimulating Leadership: A Critical Incident Study of
Leaders Influence on Creativity in Research Groups. Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 20(1), 49-58.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-8691.2010.00585.x
Yukl, G., Gordon, A. and Taber, T. (2002) A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Leadership Behavior:
Integrating a Half Century of Behavior Research. Journal of Leadership and Organizational
Studies, 9, 1532.