ترکیب خلاقیت و کنترل : درک انگیزه فردی در خلاقیت مشارکتی در مقیاس بزرگ

Recent research has shown that management control systems (MCS) can improve performance in contexts characterized by high levels of task uncertainty. This seems to conflict with a second stream of research, which argues that MCSs risk undermining the intrinsic motivation needed for effective performance in such settings. To solve this puzzle, we build on theories of perceived locus of causality and self-construal and develop an integrative model summarized in 15 propositions. To explicate our proposed solution and to show its robustness, we focus on the class of activities we call large-scale collaborative creativity (LSCC) – contexts where individuals face a dual challenge of demonstrating creativity and embracing the formal controls that coordinate their creative activities with others’. We argue that LSCC requires the simultaneous activation of intrinsic and identified forms of motivation, and simultaneously independent and interdependent self-construals. Against some scholarship that argues or assumes that such simultaneous combinations are infeasible, we argue that they can be fostered through appropriate attraction–selection–attrition policies and management control systems design. We also show how our propositions can enrich our understanding of motivation in other settings, where creativity and/or coordination demands are less pressing.

Recent management accounting literature has identified an important role for management control systems in highly uncertain situations and has documented the positive impact of management control systems on creative exploration and innovation activities in settings such as new product development and knowledge-intensive firms (e.g., Abernethy and Brownell, 1999, Ahrens and Chapman, 2004, Bisbe and Otley, 2004, Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997, Cardinal, 2001, Chapman, 1998, Davila, 2000, Davila, Foster, and Li, 2009 and Ditillo, 2004). For example, Simons (1995) develops a “levers of control” framework to address the question of how managers can combine innovation and control. Chapman (1998) uses four in-depth case studies conducted in the UK clothing and textile industry to show the beneficial role of accounting in highly uncertain conditions. Using a contingency approach, Davila (2000) shows how companies adapt their systems to the characteristics of different product development efforts. In a sample of 57 pharmaceutical firms, Cardinal (2001) finds that input, behavior, and output controls all enhance radical innovation. Ditillo (2004)’s case studies of three project teams in a large UK software firm document contribution of management controls to performance in software development. Indeed, recent theoretical and empirical research in management accounting and control represents a paradigm shift away from the traditional focus on established objectives and stable environments (Davila, Foster, and Oyon, 2009, 2009, Davila, Foster, and Li, 2009 and Simons, 1995). The new paradigm highlights the role of management control systems in innovation and uncertain environments, envisioning formal management control systems as “flexible and dynamic frames adapting and evolving to the unpredictability of innovation, but stable to frame cognitive models, communication patterns, and actions” (Davila, Foster, & Li, 2009, p. 327). However, another stream of research builds on an impressive body of work in psychology, especially studies of motivation and creativity, to argue that management control systems risk undermining the intrinsic motivation needed for effective performance of highly uncertain tasks. For example, Ouchi (1979) argues that in a research setting, strong forms of output or behavioral controls would not be as effective as “clan” controls, which rely on shared values to orient researchers’ behavior. Empirically, Amabile and her associates have conducted a series of studies in R&D labs and other innovation-intensive settings to highlight the importance of intrinsic motivation, freedom, and minimal formalized procedures and constraints (e.g., Amabile, 1998 and Amabile and Gryskiewiecz, 1987). Abernethy and Lillis (1995) find that flexible manufacturing firms rely more heavily on “spontaneous contact” and “integrative liaison devices” than traditional firms. In a research and development setting, Abernethy and Brownell (1997) find that when task uncertainty is high, personnel controls are more effective than accounting or behavioral controls in enhancing performance. In the current state of management control systems research, we are therefore confronted with a puzzle: how can companies use management control systems effectively to support relatively uncertain and creative tasks if in doing so they risk undermining the required employee motivation? This puzzle is particularly important in the context of activities where individuals face a dual challenge of demonstrating creativity and embracing the formal controls that coordinate their creative activities with others’. We call such activity large-scale collaborative creativity (LSCC). Creativity is needed when tasks are uncertain; formal controls are needed when tasks are complex and interdependent. These two conditions are frequently found together in the demands facing employees involved in LSCC activities such as developing a new drug or designing a new generation car, airplane, or large-scale software system. The available theories of motivation for creativity have been developed primarily in the context of individual and small-groupcreativity. These theories highlight the critical role of intrinsic motivation, of values that honor individuals’ divergent thinking, and of the autonomy from organizational controls that is critical to the maintenance of such psychological orientations (Collins & Amabile, 1999). In LSCC tasks, however, informal coordination must be supplemented by formal management control systems because the number of contributors is too large and their creative contributions are too differentiated and too closely interdependent (Mintzberg, 1979). Therefore, contributors in LSCC must be motivated simultaneously to exercise individual creativity and to embrace formal management controls and values that honor conforming to organizational constraints and serving collective goals. Existing theories of motivation make it difficult to understand how these dual demands of LSCC can be met. Indeed, in the opinion of some scholars, LSCC poses a real paradox (Chu et al., 2004, Gotsi et al., 2010, Lewis, 2000, Sitkin et al., 1994 and Zhou and George, 2003). The recommendations that flow from these theories of motivation are to partition the organization so that individuals can focus on one type of demand or the other (Lawrence and Lorsch, 1967 and Tushman and O’Reilly, 1997). Nevertheless, a growing body of organization-level research challenges this skepticism and suggests that creativity and coordination can indeed be combined. Recent research on “contextual” ambidexterity (Gibson & Birkenshaw, 2004) suggests that organizations do not need to be partitioned to excel at both exploitation and exploration because individuals and teams within the same unit can master both challenges. Supporting this more optimistic view, recent management accounting research has drawn on concepts such as interactive control systems (Simons, 1995) and enabling bureaucracy (Adler & Borys, 1996) to highlight the potentially positive role of formal management control systems in creative tasks. The motivational underpinnings of such organizational designs remain, however, as yet unclear. To resolve the dual-goal paradox, we bring together two clusters of concepts from the psychology literature: perceived locus of causality (PLOC) and self-construal. In the first step of our argument, we use the concept of PLOC to examine a range of forms of motivation arrayed along a spectrum from purely internal to purely external. Between these two ends of the spectrum lie two intermediate forms – introjection (motivation based on avoidance of guilt, shame or disapproval) and identification (motivation based on congruence with one’s values or goals) (Ryan & Connell, 1989). We consider all four forms’ effects on creativity and coordination. We highlight the connection between the intrinsic form of motivation and creativity, and between the identified form of motivation and coordination. We argue that LSCC requires simultaneously high levels of intrinsic and identified motivation, and we explain how this simultaneity is feasible. Identification, however, has different effects on both creativity and coordination depending on whether the associated internalization has created an individual – a subject of motivation – whose self-construal is more independent or more interdependent, and whose values are correspondingly more individualistic or more collectivistic. In the second step of our argument, we argue that independent self-construals facilitate creativity and that interdependent self-construals facilitate coordination. We argue that LSCC requires that people experience as salient both independent and interdependent self-construals, and we explain how this simultaneity too is feasible. The third step of our argument specifies the antecedent conditions required for the emergence of such a complex type of motivational orientation and suggests that these conditions can be attained through a combination of attraction–selection–attrition policies and management control systems design choices. The final step generalizes beyond LSCC settings to tasks with lower creativity and/or coordination demands. Our study makes two primary contributions to the management control systems literature. First, even though Simons (1995)’s levers of control framework and much recent work on creative activities have emphasized the requirements for both creativity and control, this work leaves unanswered the question of how management control systems influence employees’ motivation. By elucidating the individual-level motivational orientations that enable LSCC, we establish an important link between control mechanisms and outcomes of organizations’ innovation activities, thus providing a more complete understanding of the processes through which control systems can support collective creativity. Second, we help resolve the mixed findings on the effects of management control systems on performance in creative activities such as new product development. Davila (2000) uses a contingency framework to explain this mixed evidence, while Ditillo (2004) attributes the mixed evidence to the variation in the variables that have been used to capture uncertainty and the role assigned to management control systems. Our study provides an additional explanation for these mixed results. Management control systems that support collaborative creative activities must be designed and implemented so as to induce both intrinsic and identified motivation as well as independent and interdependent self-construals; depending on organizations’ success in meeting this challenge, outcomes will vary.

Recent management accounting literature documents the positive impact of management control systems on creativity and innovation (e.g., Abernethy and Brownell, 1997, Ahrens and Chapman, 2004, Bisbe and Otley, 2004, Brown and Eisenhardt, 1997, Cardinal, 2001, Chapman, 1998, Davila, 2000 and Davila, Foster, and Li, 2009). However, extant studies have predominantly focused on organizational-level variables and have ignored individual-level variables. The present paper addresses this limitation in prior literature by highlighting the individual-level motivational challenge and identifying the individual-level motivational orientations that would enable large-scale collaborative creativity. The dual motivational challenge of LSCC appears insurmountable if we begin with the individualistic assumptions that all external controls are coercive and that self-construals are essentially independent. We have argued that once we recognize a richer range of forms of motivation, we can acknowledge the important role that identification can play, and we can see how intrinsic and identified forms of motivation can coexist. We then argued that we also need to consider the values that are internalized in this identification process because these values shape the nature of the subject of motivation, and we showed how individualistic and collectivistic values can coexist as can the corresponding self-construals. Much of organization design literature treats “organic” and “mechanistic” as two ideal types (e.g., Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Woodman et al., 1993). This makes LSCC seem impossible: if intrinsic motivation is essential for individual creativity, and organic structures are necessary to support intrinsic motivation, then based on this ideal-type assumption it is hard to see how an organization can simultaneously implement the mechanistic structure needed to assure the control of large-scale task interdependencies. Our discussion suggests that these are really two orthogonal dimensions of organization, and through the implementation of the appropriate control systems and enabling forms of bureaucracy, these dimensions can be combined to support LSCC. Based on the propositions developed in our study, we proposed a 4 × 2 typology of motivational orientations, defined by the form of motivation (four positions along the PLOC gradient) and the subject of motivation (independent versus interdependent self-construals). Finally, we specified some antecedent conditions required for the emergence of the appropriate motivational orientations for LSCC settings. The list of antecedents discussed in our study was by no means intended to be exhaustive, but the discussion does demonstrate that the motivational orientation required for LSCC can be supported by judicious organizational policies. We also suggest that our conceptual framework can shed light on other types of tasks with moderate creativity or coordination demands. Our study makes several contributions. First, by identifying the individual-level motivational orientations that enable large-scale collaborative creativity, we explicate the motivational effects of management control systems and contribute to a more complete understanding of the linkages between control mechanisms and the output of organizations’ innovation activities. Unlike the previous accounting literature that tends to emphasize the role of control systems in inducing and directing effort, we suggest that the path from intrinsic and identified motivations to creativity and coordination does not work by inducing more effort alone. They also work in part by inducing positive affect and broadening cognition in a way that enables creativity and coordination without individuals consciously exerting effort toward these behaviors. Second, the existing management accounting literature has provided mixed evidence on the effect of management control systems and performance on creative activities. Our study provides an additional explanation for the mixed evidence in prior literature. Specifically, to enable participants in collective creative activities to reconcile the creativity and control demands, management systems must be designed to induce intrinsic and identified motivation as well as independent and interdependent self-construals simultaneously. Variations in the success across organizations in meeting this challenge will lead to different performance outcomes. Finally, we extend the literature on creativity and an emerging literature on the role of management control systems in creativity and innovation by identifying the motivational underpinnings of large-scale collaborative creativity. By introducing two clusters of concepts from the psychology literature, we provide new insights concerning individual motivation in collective creative activities. Our model of individual motivation for LSCC has implications for the design of management control systems in organizations seeking to increase the effectiveness of LSCC. We argue that organizations have a significant degree of control over the antecedents of both the forms of motivation and the self-construals of their members. While more research is needed to specify the optimal mix of policies, it seems clear that management action can support the motivational orientation needed for LSCC. First, to the extent that people’s motivational orientations are dispositional, managerial policies can support LSCC by fostering appropriate attraction–selection–attrition patterns so as to ensure that the organization is staffed with the appropriate personnel, specifically seeking out people with high intrinsic motivation and high identified motivation as well as people with fluid orientations. Second, insofar as individual motivation can be influenced by situational factors, several strands of theory identify organization and control system designs that support the requisite motivational orientations and thereby increase the potential for successful LSCC. As Davila, Foster, and Oyon (2009) note, a literature is emerging on a new control paradigm where management control systems are conceptualized not as hindrance but as a facilitator in entrepreneurship and innovation. This study adds to this literature by exploring the motivational underpinnings of this new control paradigm. Further research can extend the set of variables that can induce the motivational orientations required for LSCC settings. Follow-up research could also empirically test the propositions in this study using data from the field. In addition, new insights could emerge by combining the individual and organizational levels of analysis in empirical studies.