Creativity and innovation are generally understood as routine drivers of successful organizational growth. Organizations are facing enormous pressure to innovate in order to attain competitive advantage from the global environment that is increasingly becoming intricate and competitive. Due to this, organizational management has to inculcate or reinforce culture of creativity and innovation within organization; however, much of the focus in this endeavor is on the individual level but team work is also essentially encouraged. Individuals are of vital importance in creativity and the innovation process requires a supportive well-managed atmosphere that can translate novel ideas into innovative product effectively. Generally the two concepts are diverse as creativity can be production of new ideas and concepts, which are applied through a process, which then becomes innovation. This states that any innovation is a process that is based on the creativity of mind(s) and creativity is reliant on innovation to become tangible. Continue reading
Modern Management Concepts
Theory of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.” -Csikszentmihalyi, 1990. The theory of flow (also referred to as positive psychology) was developed by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as described in his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” In this state of being, people are motivated by inherent enjoyment of the challenges provided by the activity, and are subsequently more productive and happier. He identifies a number of different elements involved in achieving flow: There are clear goals every step Continue reading
The Pros and Cons of Outsourcing
Outsourcing involves assigning some of the business tasks or a department to another business. This is done when a business cannot handle all of its activities internally. They can also do so in search for expertise of a specific task. The businesses that are mostly involved in outsourcing include manufacturing, logistics, customer services, recruitment, web designing, information, content development and technology maintenance among others. The factors that influence decision making on outsourcing includes staff, finances, information characteristics, agreement issues, and vendor issues. Out sourcing involves two businesses which come in to a contractual agreement to exchange services for payment. A business contacts another business to carry out a particular task and in return they pay for the services provided with. Business people do outsource in order to get time to do other significant roles. This saves time and can allow a business person to do other businesses thus increasing his profits. Continue reading
Concept Mapping – A Tool For Organizing And Representing Knowledge
About Concept Mapping “If I had to reduce all of educational psychology to just one principle I would say this: The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly.” – David Ausubel (1968) Concept mapping emerges directly from David P. Ausubel’s Assimilation Theory of meaningful verbal learning. The underlying basis of the theory is that meaningful (as opposed to rote) human learning occurs when new knowledge is consciously and purposively linked to an existing framework of prior knowledge in a non-arbitrary, substantive fashion. In rote (or memorized) learning, new concepts are added to the learner’s framework in an arbitrary and verbatim way, producing a weak and unstable structure that quickly degenerates. Joseph Novak is widely credited as the creator of concept maps, and has been writing and researching them since the 1970s. “Concept maps are intended to represent meaningful relationship Continue reading
Paradoxical Thinking
For decades, the management theorists have focused their attention on three types of thinking i.e. magical thinking, modern thinking and postmodern thinking. The latest inclusion is the paradoxical thinking. The main reason that paradoxical thinking has gained importance in the business world is that there were some buzz phrases that were being used by the employees of the organisations such as controlled chaos, getting outside the box, breaking the frame of reference, creative destruction, fuzzy logic and etc. All of these terminologies show that a business can develop something impossible by going beyond the imaginative framework and these old models have less importance in the contemporary world. The primary crux of the paradoxical thinking is that the openness can be anything but it is indecisive, lacks principled convictions and is sometimes passionless as well. Paradoxical thinking implies that problems should be looked from different angles rather than one perspective so Continue reading
Causes of Resistance to Organizational Change
The main reasons for resistance to change are both individual and organization. The research document of individual and organizational behavior has found that organization groups and individuals resist change. Resistance to change provides a degree of stability and predictability to behavior, as it does not allow immediate change. If there was no resistance to change the organization will take on characteristics of chaotic randomness. Read: Reactions to Organization Change There may be reasons for resistance to change for analytical purpose, lets us categories the causes into the following. Individual Resistance. Group Resistance. Organizational Resistance. 1. Individual Resistance Individual arise due to differing perceptions, personalities and needs. Some of these reasons appear to be rational and emotional. These reasons are listed below, a). Economic Factors The economic reasons for the resistance to change may be the following: In organization when the development or change on technology takes place, employee resists the Continue reading