EDO 812 Module 6 Leadership for Innovation Example

Open, Then Close: Leadership Behaviors That Foster Innovation and a Plan for Leading County Innovation Teams

Student Name

Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDO 812: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Open, Then Close: Leadership Behaviors That Foster Innovation and a Plan for Leading County Innovation Teams

I lead program innovation at Plains State Extension, an invented outreach service of a land-grant university. Six cross-county teams report to me, each developing a new program: a farm-transfer clinic for aging owners, an online beginning-beekeeping course, a rural child-care business workshop, a drought-planning toolkit, a grocery app nutrition partnership and a youth robotics club. Two teams launched programs on time last year; two stalled; two are behind. Team members' comments in the annual survey ranged from appreciation for my enthusiasm to frustration that I kept adding ideas when they needed decisions. This paper reviews research on leadership for innovation and applies it to my own behavior. The service, my role and the teams are invented for this course.

The Environment for Creativity

Amabile et al. (1996) built a survey of how people experience their work setting, tested it across a range of organizations and checked its scales against outside judgments of how creative projects were. They identified environmental stimulants to creativity, including organizational encouragement, supervisory encouragement, work group supports, freedom in deciding how to carry out work, sufficient resources and challenging work, and obstacles, including excessive workload pressure and organizational impediments such as internal politics and conservatism. Projects judged highly creative were characterized by higher levels of the stimulants and lower levels of the obstacles than projects judged less creative.

The framework shows that a leader shapes creativity mostly indirectly, through the environment teams work in. Several of its dimensions, such as supervisory encouragement, freedom and resources, are directly within my influence. Others, such as organizational impediments, I can only report upward. The distinction matters for this paper's plan, which concentrates on what a mid-level leader can change on Monday morning rather than on reforms that would require the dean.

Everyday Leader Behavior

Amabile et al. (2004) studied how leaders' daily behavior affected the people they led. Team members in several companies kept daily diaries over the course of creative projects, describing events and their own reactions. Small actions by team leaders, both positive and negative, shaped whether members perceived their leader as supportive. Positive behaviors included monitoring work in a supportive way, consulting members and recognizing their efforts, while negative behaviors included failing to clarify roles or goals, checking work in an intrusive way and failing to respond to problems. Perceived leader support, in turn, related to members' creativity.

The finding is humbling, because it locates leadership in ordinary moments: how I respond to an e-mail asking for funds, whether I remember a team's deadline, how I react to a draft.

Opening and Closing

Rosing et al. (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between leadership styles and innovation and found it inconsistent: the same styles were related positively in some studies and weakly or negatively in others. They argued that innovation requires both exploration, generating and trying new ideas, and exploitation, refining and implementing them, and that these call for different leader behaviors. Opening behaviors, such as encouraging experimentation, allowing different ways of doing things and tolerating errors, support exploration. Closing behaviors, such as setting routines, monitoring goal attainment and correcting deviations, support exploitation. They proposed that the most effective leaders are ambidextrous, switching flexibly between the two as a project's needs change.

Assessing My Own Behavior

I drew on three sources: the annual survey's comments, a structured conversation with each team lead and three months of my calendar, coded by type of interaction.

A Plan to Change Three Behaviors

First, a weekly resource check: every Monday I will review each team's open requests for funds, staff time or approvals and answer within five working days, addressing the resource stimulant and the obstacle of impediments. Second, explicit phase shifts: each project will have a named point, agreed with the team, at which it moves from exploring to delivering, after which I will stop proposing new ideas and switch to closing behaviors such as setting milestones and checking progress, as Rosing and colleagues recommend. Third, short supportive progress reviews: fifteen minutes every two weeks with each team lead, focused on obstacles rather than on reporting, drawing on the positive monitoring behaviors in Amabile and colleagues' diary study.

Measuring Whether It Works

I will track the time to answer resource requests, ask team leads every quarter whether they know which phase their project is in and repeat the work-environment questions on the next annual survey. The real test is whether more of the six programs launch on time next year without losing the experimentation that produced them. I have also asked one team lead, whose comments in the survey were the most critical, to tell me directly each month whether the changes are visible from her side. A leader's view of their own behavior is the least reliable source in this assessment, and the research on everyday support suggests that what team members notice, not what the leader intends, is what shapes their work.

Limits

Some obstacles lie beyond my control. Workload pressure, which Amabile and colleagues found obstructs creativity, is set by the service's staffing and by county commitments that educators cannot drop. I can protect time for innovation teams but cannot remove their other duties, and the plan should be judged with that limit in mind.

Conclusion

Research on creativity and innovation shows that leaders matter mostly through the environment they create and the small behaviors they repeat. Amabile and colleagues identify the stimulants and obstacles, their diary study shows how everyday actions shape support and Rosing, Frese and Bausch show that leaders must both open and close. My assessment shows strength at opening and weakness at resourcing and closing, and three specific changes address those gaps.

References

Amabile, T. M., Conti, R., Coon, H., Lazenby, J., & Herron, M. (1996). Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 39(5), 1154-1184. https://doi.org/10.5465/256995

Amabile, T. M., Schatzel, E. A., Moneta, G. B., & Kramer, S. J. (2004). Leader behaviors and the work environment for creativity: Perceived leader support. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(1), 5-32. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2003.12.003

Rosing, K., Frese, M., & Bausch, A. (2011). Explaining the heterogeneity of the leadership-innovation relationship: Ambidextrous leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 22(5), 956-974. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2011.07.014