Rapid industrialization and the continuous innovation of information technology have demanded new methods of solving issues. As a result, the creativity and creative behaviors of members in organizations are being evaluated as an important ability in ...
Rapid industrialization and the continuous innovation of information technology have demanded new methods of solving issues. As a result, the creativity and creative behaviors of members in organizations are being evaluated as an important ability in the modern society. In this context, creativity is referred to as the ability to think of new ideas or innovative solutions, and creative behavior implies the action of adopting and applying a new idea that is helpful for the achievement of organizational goals or performing tasks assigned to individuals based on their creativity.
A lot of studies have diversely been conducted on the creative behaviors of members in modern organizations. However, most of them have been conducted in the private sectors or on universities. Therefore, only a few studies have been conducted on Research & Development personnel. In addition, such studies are mostly focused on finding one strong variable that affects creative behaviors instead of considering diverse variables extensively. Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify how personal backgrounds (information on gender, age, and yeares of service), self-leadership, and working environment variables affect the realization of creative behaviors of those working in public research institutions and to discuss the supporting system and measures of improvement that should be provided by such institutions for the realization of creative behaviors.
For this purposes, the study performed the following three steps. First, it was analized how the personal backgrounds of individuals working in public research institutions influence their creative behaviors. Second, it was discussed how the self-leadership of the people working in the institutions influenced their creative behaviors. Third, it was considered how the creative behaviors of those working in the research institutions were influenced by working environment variables.
In this study, a survey was developed according to previous research works and conducted by combining random and non-random sampling methods. Analysis was performed on 203 valid data from the participants except for missing values. Further, SPSS 22.0 was used to perform multiple regression analysis on the data. The major results of the study were summarized as follows:
First, among the personal backgrounds information of those working in public research institutions, gender and service years did not influence creative behaviors. However, the age of employees significantly affected their creative behaviors. Second, it was found that the self-leadership of those working in research institutions positively influenced the realization of their creative behaviors. Third, among the work environment variables pertaining to those working in such institutions, there was no significant result on the deteriorating factors of work environment. However, the study confirmed that improving working environment variables remarkably influenced the realization of employees’ creative behaviors.
This research is meaningful in that it integrated personal backgrounds and internal and external characteristics of employees with respect to their creative behaviors. In addition, this study emphasized the need to formulate measures for improving self-leadership of employees in public research institutions and conditions for systematically managing working environment variables for the realization of the employees’ creative behaviors.