Organisational Cultural Conditions and Creativity and Innovation in the South African Media Industry

Date
2012-02-13
Authors
Crwys-Williams, Geraint
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Abstract
Many organisations turn to innovation as a potential source of quick additional profits, or in the hope that the sudden surge of creative focus will deliver to the business a powerful new element of competitive advantage out in the marketplace. This seldom happens though, and organisations wanting to tap into the creativity and innovativeness of their employees need to start by examining the culture of their organisation. This research report attempts to identify which elements or characteristics of organisational culture encourage employee creativity and innovation. It is hoped that by discovering which specific attributes of a company’s culture promote these behaviours, those people leading the organisation will be better equipped to put together a set of meaningful interventions to eliminate the undesirable elements of the culture, and consciously promote others. An extensive examination of the theory base was carried out, and the findings emanating from the review were then compared to the data collected from questionnaires administered and interviews conducted with respondents from Primedia (Ltd), a leading South African media company. Emerging from the research was the confirmation of twelve organisational cultural characteristics which encourage creativity and innovation, that were identified in the existing literature. One additional attribute emanating from the literature was not accepted as being applicable to this research context. This research also identified five new cultural characteristics, which did not emerge in the existing theory base, as being drivers of creativity and innovation in the South African media organisational context.
Description
MBA thesis - WBS
Keywords
Media industry, Creativity in the media industry
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