Solution-oriented versus Novelty-oriented Leadership Instructions: Cognitive Effect on Creative Ideation

International audienceThe generation of novel ideas is critical to any innovative endeavor. However, one of the key obstacles to creativity is known as the fixation effect, which is the cognitive effect that constrains the generation of novel ideas due to the spontaneous activation of existing knowledge and solutions in individuals’ mind. Expert leaders have been considered to play an important role in overcoming these biases using diverse tools. One of these principal instruments is task instruction. Our hypothesis is that leaders’ instructions can have significant effects on followers’ ideation capacity. We investigated the effect of an instruction given by a leader to his team to generate as many original ideas to a particular creative task, either using solution or novelty-oriented approaches. Results confirmed that solution-oriented instructions activated knowledge bases in fixation, while solution-oriented instructions inhibited these knowledge bases. These results give us new sights into novel models of “less-expert” creative leadership