Perceptions of creativity and innovation in relation to diversity in South Africa
Date
2012-11-14
Authors
Skinstad, Kate
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Abstract
In today‟s competitive business environment, the ability of organisations to innovate continually is becoming critical to their survival. Managing a cultural environment that is supportive of innovation is challenging enough, but combining that with a diverse workforce, with divergent opinions, makes the task more difficult.
This research set out to ascertain which factors affect innovation within South African organisations and whether groups exist with different perceptions about the factors that affect organisational innovation, through case research within Primedia, a South African media organisation. Aspects of diversity, including demographic and personality variables were used to define these groups with differing perceptions.
Initially 10 small scale pilot studies were conducted to assess the research instrument. Subsequently 436 complete responses were collected via a quantitative survey distributed online through an email invitation. The sample was well representative of the organisation surveyed as respondents were from multiple business units and geographic locations. In addition, the sample was in most cases well representative of the South African population.
The key findings were that different clusters do exist that have differing opinions about the factors that affect organisational innovation, particularly with regard to two of the three factors that emerged from the factor analysis; „managerial support‟ and „organisational structure and boundaries‟. No significant differences of opinion emerged amongst the demographic variables with regard to the third factor, „work discretion‟, although direct analysis of the results revealed that this was an important factor to foster innovation for all groups surveyed. Two of the factors present within the literature - „time availability‟ and „rewards / reinforcement - did not emerge in the factor analysis, although this is most likely due to a methodological anomaly and they should not be discounted as important contributors to innovation. Although the found clusters contained sufficient segmentation across the multiple demographic variables used, the clusters may be difficult to segment in an organisational context when applying specific managerial actions to the results. Thus, an alternate analytical approach was used to reveal significant findings within the demographic and personality variables when analysed in isolation. Although the variation explained by the personality variables was slight, the demographic variables did reveal some useful variations between the mean responses of groups, particularly within the variables 1) population group, 2) language, 3) education, 4) job level, and 5) household income. These differences may be useful to leaders when formulating meaningful strategies for fostering organisational innovation, within particular sub-sectors of their populations.
These findings highlight the challenges faced by managers in the diverse population of South Africa, as illustrated by the case of Primedia. However, they do reveal that various groups within the organisation can indeed be segmented, based on demographic and personality variables, to increase the effectiveness of innovation enhancing initiatives, within discreet segments.
Description
MBA thesis - WBS
Keywords
Diversity - South Africa, Creativity - South Africa, Innovation