Facilitating Employee Creativity: What Can We Learn from Online Work Community?

Creativity has been recognized as vital to organization success. With the rise of the new creative class (Florida, 2002), scholars and organization practitioners have been seeking ways of changing organizational settings to better facilitate creativity production in organizations. Online work communities (OWC), a new type of organization, have been emerging around creative works in the last decade. In this paper, we investigate the potential effects that online communities may have on facilitating employee creativity in organizations. Drawing on prior research about creativity in organizations, we set up a conceptual framework for analyzing organizational contextual effects on individual creativity. The framework categorizes contextual factors into three categories, related to intrinsic motivation, knowledge, and social capital respectively. For each contextual factor in the framework, we discuss how it has been supported in online work communities, with illustrations using exemplar communities. Finally, we propose a model that summarizes how specific characteristics of online work communities might facilitate creativity production in organizations.