Impacts of organizational change on organizational creativity
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Shin Hyung-Deok , Park Ju-Yeon , Lee Ji-Eun 
Published: April 2019

So far, research on creativity has focused on individual perception, disposition, and knowledge, but research on creativity at organizational level is relatively rare. Creativity is expressed at the individual level as well as at the organization level. Since the creativity of an individual is high, the creativity of the organization is not necessarily high, and the internal factors such as learning culture, corporate culture, operating method, and business process in the organization also affect the creativity of the organization. In this study, we focus on organizational change among factors influencing organizational creativity. In particular, organizational change was classified into organizational change and operational change, and it was studied whether each type of change had different effects on organizational creativity. Structural change is the change of organization through simplification of hierarchy, emphasis on autonomous consensus, change to horizontal relation, delegation of authority. On the other hand, change of operational aspects is to change the human resource management system centering on the human and capability through changing the role of managers, performance management criteria, job rotation etc.
Creativity can be developed at organizational level as well as individual level. This study focused on organizational change as a critical element of organizational creativity. Especially, this study divided organizational change into structural and operational change and investigated if two types of changes have different impacts on organizational creativity.
To do this, we used the 2011 Human Capital Corporate Panel(HCCP) data collected by Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training, and 2015 patent data to measure organizational creativity. Using 341 company survey data, we found that variables for both structural change and operational change had significant effects on the number of patent applications. Organizational creativity, which is a dependent variable, was measured by the number of patent applications, and independent variables were measured by the items included in the questionnaire surveyed by the Korea Vocational Training Center. As a result, among the structural changes, the change in the way of performing work, and the change in working style and manpower placement among the operational changes had a significant effect on the number of patent applications used to measure organizational creativity. We found that only the way we do business was significant.
This study provides some implications. First, we focused on the creativity of the organization by expanding the research on creativity focusing on the personal level. Second, the effect of structural change on organizational creativity was positive only when the change of work performance was introduced. This change means that it is effective for organizations to induce mid to long term organizational change rather than short term outcomes. Third, the changes in the workplace behavior and the changeover of the operational change had a significant positive impact on the number of patent applications. This suggests that creativity can be improved at the organizational level without changing the structure in the organization. The results of this study demonstrate empirically that organizational change is related to organizational creativity promotion, but there is a limit to the need to develop a means to measure objectivity more creatively by relying on the number of patent applications.