General Bayesian Network approach to balancing exploration and exploitation to maintain individual creativity in organization

Abstract

As market competition grows fierce, how to maintain competitiveness in the market emerges a crucial issue for all the organizations. Aware of this urgent fact, companies have been seeking best way of managing their creativity at competitive levels. However, most of existing approaches currently discussed in literature were limited to narrative and elusive statements from which creativity management strategists could not extract set of concrete action rules. To overcome this pitfall, this study proposes a novel approach to creativity management by adopting General Bayesian Network (GBN). Especially, based on the findings from literature that balance of exploration and exploitation leads to sustainable management of creativity, we built a research model including the five variables affecting individual creativity such as exploration, exploitation, task complexity, bureaucratic culture, and supportive culture. To induce a set of causal relationships among the individual creativity and the five variables, GBN was applied to 227 valid questionnaire sample data. Through the what-if and goal-seeking simulations, promising empirical results were obtained, which shed robust and meaningful platform for further studies in this exciting field. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.