Leadership influencing Organisational creativity : the case of IKEA

Increasing competitions in the markets, companies are tending to acquire different potential competitive advantages. Cost-effective ways of doing business have been deeply underpinned in every leader’s minds. However, the problem is how to obtain the most cost-effective way to operate business apart...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ratana, Totrakarntrakul, Yan, Jessica Sze Lang
Format: Others
Language:English
Published: Högskolan i Kalmar, Handelshögskolan BBS 2008
Subjects:
Online Access:http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hik:diva-755
Description
Summary:Increasing competitions in the markets, companies are tending to acquire different potential competitive advantages. Cost-effective ways of doing business have been deeply underpinned in every leader’s minds. However, the problem is how to obtain the most cost-effective way to operate business apart from cutting costs or other strategies which only focus on short-term measures. Nowadays, employees’ creativity are claimed to be highly valuable for the organisation to become successful and sustainable. Since, we are interested in what kind of organisational structure, culture and working environment would have positive influence on employees’ creativity at work, how those working qualities are able for employees to increase their capability on creativity; and also the constraints of those working environment on employees’ creativity will also be discussed. To have a better understanding of our research area, a single case study is introduced as a tool helping us to get to know more about the real life and in a practical perspective. Since, a Swedish company has been chosen as our case study here. In order to reach the purpose of our study, our research questions focused on what factors in the organisation and what characteristics of leadership styles can beneficial to employees’ creativity, and the constraints of the organisation for the employees’ creativity. Based on our frame of reference and our research questions, we investigated the relevant literatures for our better understanding of the research area. It is also used as a guide for us to collecting data. We used qualitative single case study as our approach to acquire data and interviews were conducted with the IKEA managers. A qualitative inquiry method is used, entailing in-depth interviews with four employees of IKEA with different types of positions and departments. The results show that their impression and experience of the company vary in some aspects, as different positions might perceive differently.