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Unleashing Creativity in the Workplace: Apprenticeships in the Swiss Telecommunication and Public Transportation Industry
Abstract
This chapter addresses the overarching question of how creativity can be supported within Swiss apprenticeship training. It provides a critical assessment of creativity and its relevance to the workforce followed by an assessment of how Swiss apprenticeships are functioning, based on two explorative case studies in the telecommunication and public transport industry in Switzerland. The chapter elaborates on the workplace experience of apprentices and on attitudes, beliefs and values towards creativity at work expressed by different stakeholders involved in apprenticeship training. A number of recommendations on how human resource development can support learning in apprenticeships and unleash young peoples’ creative potential in support of innovations will be provided.
Today, creativity is considered a success factor in many occupational fields and a core competence of the 21st century. In vocational education and training (VET), creativity is defined as problem-solving ability and ascribed to the transversal competences. Creativity is always context-dependent in terms of the work environment and specific demands of an occupation. To implement creativity didactically in the classroom and in the workplace, it is important to understand what creativity entails in the context of different occupations. Accordingly, the aim of this interview study was to conduct an initial investigation into the facets of creative potential in different occupations. Since a suitable instrument for measuring creativity does not exist in VET at time of writing, this study was based on theories and instruments used in psychology. The findings of this study show that in the four occupations studied (commercial clerk, specialist in care, IT specialist, and design engineer), different facets of creativity were relevant to successfully coping with creative situations. Overall, divergent and convergent thinking were identified as the most important facets of creativity in the professional creative situations examined.
Apprentices are generally trained at one company during their apprenticeship. But, responsibilities in an apprenticeship can also be shared
between different companies, through collaboration and external support, relieving the companies of the risks, time and effort associated with
training an apprentice for an entire programme.
Sharing apprenticeships is particularly relevant
for companies which are too small (SMEs) or
specialised to cover the whole curriculum of an
apprenticeship, for companies which have a relatively short production horizon, or for those
with limited availability due to seasonal or cyclical changes. For apprentices, rotating between
different workplaces can be a solution whenever
there is a shortage of companies which can cover the entire training programme.
Rotation can thus be a solution for companies and apprentices whenever an entire apprenticeship is difficult or impossible to attain. How
this rotation is organised is not always the same:
there are different ways in different countries,
and some countries even have several forms of
rotation. This study reports such examples of rotation in different countries and investigates the
possible benefits for companies and learners, as
well as the issues which should be addressed.
From these examples, the study identifies a set
of aspects of rotation, such as the type of learner
and level of education, whether or not rotation
occurs in the same sector, the order of workplaces, individual or group learning, how many companies are involved, what the type of agreement
is and whether the apprentices are remunerated.
The last aspect, who or what is responsible for
the organisation of the rotation, is what categorises the different examples into different types
of rotation: rotation where the companies, the
apprentices or an external body is responsible
for the organisation.
The current literature review discusses 21st century skills in the context of primary education. A sample of texts satisfying the predetermined inclusion criteria was analyzed (n=40), with the aims of synthesizing the proposed frameworks that are most cited by authors interested in 21st century skills and competencies in primary education (n=6) and the dimensions of the skills and competencies mostly emphasized and researched in the particular context, according to the literature review research questions. The results showed a particular interest in skills and competences related to the conditions of the information and communications technology development, globalization and the need for innovation. However, a need for research focusing specifically in the context of primary education was recognized.
Ziel des Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) ist es, die Kompetenzen der Schülerinnen und Schüler am Ende der Pflichtschulzeit festzustellen, die in vielen OECD-Staaten im Alter von 15 Jahren erreicht wird. Dabei geht es zunächst um Basiskompetenzen, deren primäre Förderung sich einzelnen Schulfächern zuordnen lässt: Lesekompetenz (Reading Literacy), mathematische Grundbildung (Mathematical Literacy) und naturwissenschaftliche Grundbildung (Science Literacy). Diese Kompetenzen werden in allen drei PISA-Zyklen mit unterschiedlichen Schwerpunkten erfasst — 2000 mit Schwerpunkt im Lesen, 2003 mit Schwerpunkt in der Mathematik, 2006 mit Schwerpunkt in den Naturwissenschaften-, und über die diesbezüglichen Ergebnisse der 2000er und 2003er Studien wurde ausführlich berichtet (z.B. Baumert u.a., 2001; Prenzel u.a., 2004a).
Die Kreativitätsforschung erlebt gerade in den letzten Jahren wieder einen regelrechten Boom. Dies liegt nicht zuletzt darin begründet, dass Kreativität auch seitens der Wirtschaft immer mehr als „ultimativer Erfolgsgarant“ hervorgehoben wird. Denn nur wer es versteht, sich durch immer neue Innovationen gegen die Wettbewerber durchzusetzen, scheint langfristig bestehen zu können. Der Bedarf an kreativen Mitarbeitern ist folglich so groß wie noch nie. Neben einer grundlegenden Erforschung des Kreativitätskonstrukts kommt damit der Testkonstruktion zu Auswahlzwecken eine ganz besondere Aufgabe zu. Es ist nicht mehr ausreichend, Bewerber einem Kreativitätstest zu unterziehen, der einen abstrakten und globalen Kreativitätswert liefert. Um den heutigen Anforderungen gerecht zu werden, müssen Kreativitätstests im organisationalen Kontext auch berufsbezogen gestaltet sein. Zudem lassen sich sowohl die Selektion als auch die Zuordnung von Bewerbern und Mitarbeitern verbessern, wenn durch die Integration eines prozessualen Verständnisses von Kreativität differenziertere Aussagen über die kreativen Fähigkeiten möglich sind.
Der im Rahmen dieser Dissertation entwickelte berufsbezogene und prozessbasierte Kreativitätstest – die Diagnose berufsbezogener Kreativität – Technik und Entwicklung (DBK-TE) – basiert auf den Ergebnissen der aktuellen Kreativitätsforschung und bietet erstmalig ein an die Anforderungen der beruflichen Praxis angepasstes Verfahren. Seiner Entwicklung liegt eine umfassende Anforderungsanalyse mit 137 Führungskräften verschiedener Branchen zugrunde. Die anforderungsbasierte Entwicklung der Items resultierte in der Kombination klassischer paper-pencil-Items mit simulativen Aufgaben, was die DBK-TE als erstes multimodales Kreativitätsverfahren auszeichnet.
Zur Validierung des Verfahrens konnten die Daten von 2 207 Personen verwendet werden. Die Konstruktion des Tests und seine psychometrische Güte erfüllen die üblichen testtheoretischen Standards. Die Prüfung der internen Struktur des Verfahrens lässt auf eine passende Repräsentation des theoretischen Modells schließen. Die zahlreichen betrachteten Zusammenhänge zu anderen Konstrukten, wie etwa zur Intelligenz, zu (speziellen) Persönlichkeitsdimensionen und zur Leistungsmotivation entsprechen den Annahmen zur diskriminanten Konstruktvalidität und auch die Validierung an bereits vorliegenden, konvergenten Kreativitätsverfahren bestätigt die Erwartungen. Die Ergebnisse aus der Kriterienvalidierung der DBK-TE weisen eine gute Prognosekraft des Verfahrens für Ausbildungs-, Berufs- und Freizeitkriterien aus.
Die Testentwicklung der DBK-TE wurde in einen breiten theoretischen Rahmen zum Konstrukt der Kreativität im Allgemeinen und den personalen Voraussetzungen für Innovativität im Berufskontext im Besonderen eingekleidet. Durch die sowohl theoretische als auch empirische Beschäftigung mit dem beruflichen Erfolgspotenzial kreativer Fähigkeiten liefert die vorliegende Arbeit einen integrativen Beitrag zum Verständnis von Kreativität als personale Anforderung.
[Researchers and economists agree about the importance of creativity for both, individual and organizational success. Nonetheless, creativity is a enigmatic term. Despite promising findings for the predictive power of creativity, its nomological network remains still quite vague. Cognitive abilities, personality traits, and motivational dispositions are commonly associated with creativity.
In this thesis theories of creativity are reflected and constructs related to creativity and innovation (e.g., intelligence, personality, and motivation) are discussed. Further on common methods for the assessment of creativity are presented and new approaches for measuring creativity in an work-related context are provided. Finally, the development and validation of an instrument measuring the personal prerequisites for innovation is described.]
We identify the creative requirement of a job as a neglected predictor of employee creativity and propose that it may account for relationships between traditional work factors and creativity. As such, it may represent a more effective means of increasing creativity than changes in job design. Using structural equation modeling, we tested this model against four competing models using a sample of 1,083 health service employees. Creative requirement was found to account for much of the variance by fully mediating the effects of supportive leadership and role requirements and partially mediating those of empowerment and time demands. We conclude that creative requirement is an important proximal determinant of employee creativity and a potentially significant intervention.
This article presents the concept of creative potential and its link to talent. Psychological measures to assess creative potential in children and adolescents (EPoC) and adults (Creative Profiler) are then described. Implications for developing creativity are proposed.
We examined the relationship between employee creativity and job performance. Further- more, we identified two learning-related personal and situational variables—employee learning orientation and transformational leadership—and examined their effects on employee creativity through employee creative self-efficacy. We found that employee creativity was positively related to employee sales and to supervisor-rated employee job performance. Employee learning orientation and transformational leadership were posi- tively related to employee creativity, and these relationships were mediated by employee creative self-efficacy. We discuss the implications of these findings for creativity theory and research, as well as for management practice.
The construct of creativity has a great deal to offer educational psychology. Creativity appears to be an important component of problem-solving and other cognitive abilities, healthy social and emotional well-being, and scholastic and adult success. Yet the study of creativity is not nearly as robust as one would expect, due in part to the preponderance of myths and stereotypes about creativity that collectively strangle most research efforts in this area. The root cause of these stereotypes is the lack of adequate precision in the definition of creativity. The body of the article is devoted to specific suggestions for conceptualizing and defining creativity to maximize its potential contributions to educational psychology.
This study examined the relationships between proactive personality and employee creativity and the moderating roles of job creativity requirement and supervisor support for creativity in activating proactive personality associated with employee creativity. To provide a rigorous test of the hypotheses, we conducted a field study from a sample of 157 employee–supervisor pairs in South Korea. The results revealed that a proactive personality was positively associated with employee creativity. In addition, job creativity requirement and supervisor support for creativity jointly influenced the relationship between proactive personality and employee creativity. Specifically, proactive employees exhibited the highest employee creativity when job creativity requirement and supervisor support for creativity were both high.
Considers the definition and assessment of creativity and presents a componential framework for conceptualizing this faculty. Including domain-relevant skills, creativity-relevant skills, and task motivation as a set of necessary and sufficient components of creativity, the framework describes the way in which cognitive abilities, personality characteristics, and social factors might contribute to stages of the creative process. The discussion emphasizes the previously neglected social factors and highlights the contributions that a social psychology of creativity can make to a comprehensive view of creative performance. (99 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Study 1 was conducted to examine the contribution of the joint condition of supervisor close monitoring and the presence of creative coworkers to employees' creativity. In addition to replicating Study 1's results, Study 2 examined (a) the joint condition of supervisor developmental feedback and presence of creative coworkers and (b) whether creative personality moderated the contributions of the 2 joint conditions. Converging results from the 2 field studies demonstrated that when creative coworkers were present, the less supervisors engaged in close monitoring, the more employees exhibited creativity. Study 2 also found that the contribution of this joint condition was stronger for employees with less creative personalities and that when creative coworkers were present, the more supervisors provided developmental feedback, the more employees exhibited creativity.
Digitalisation and a rapidly changing labour market introduce new demands on competence and these demands reinforce the renewal of Swiss apprenticeship training in businesses. The telecommunication industry is a representative example of the new challenges that vocational education and training faces. This article highlights some new approaches and pathways to apprenticeships. It shows that not only structural conditions need to be adjusted, but also the learning culture of the community of practice, which includes the shared attitudes, values and beliefs of all the actors involved in vocational education and training. As this article indicates, comprehensive changes in the apprenticeships at the enterprise studied have had a substantial impact on the development of competences such as creativity, reflection, autonomous action and initiative-taking.
Ausgangspunkt für den vorliegenden Beitrag ist die Tatsache, dass der Vertrieb im öffentlichen Verkehr (ÖV) in der Schweiz vor einer großen Herausforderung steht. Es zeichnet sich ab, dass durch die Digitalisierung und die steigenden Kundenbedürfnisse die bisher erfolgreichen und bekannten Vertriebsorganisationen und -modelle grundlegend überdacht werden müssen. Im Beitrag wird ein zukunftsfähiges Modell für den persönlichen Vertrieb im öffentlichen Verkehr entwickelt. Das Modell wurde theoriebasiert mithilfe des Business Modell Canvas konzipiert und vor dem Hintergrund der Erkenntnisse der eigenen empirischen Untersuchung im Schweizer Kontext modifiziert. Das empirisch fundierte Modell zeigt auf, wie der persönliche Vertrieb im ÖV in der Zukunft ausgestaltet werden kann, um den identifizierten veränderten Kundenbedürfnissen gerecht zu werden.
This study predicts that the intrinsic (creative personality) and extrinsic motivators (transformational leadership) reinforce employee creativity and job performance in the hospitality industry. More importantly, the positive moderating effects of organizational regulatory focus (promotion and prevention) on employee creativity are included in proposed model. To test the mode, data (339 employees and 72 supervisors) was collected from 62 Taiwan international hotels in the summer of 2014. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) were conducted to examine measurement model and hypotheses. The HLM results confirmed the effects of individual-level factors. However, an organizational promotion focus only enhances the extrinsic creative motivator. The intrinsic creative motivator was reinforced by an organizational prevention focus. The research findings suggest that hospitality managers should consider both individual- and organizational-level factors simultaneously. Indeed, the organizational goals could be set depending on the features of the department. Further discussions and implications are elucidated.
In a longitudinal, randomized field experiment, we tested the impact of transformational leadership, enhanced by training, on follower development and performance. Experimental group leaders received transformational leadership training, and control group leaders, eclectic leadership training. The sample included 54 military leaders, their 90 direct followers, and 724 indirect followers. Results indicated the leaders in the experimental group had a more positive impact on direct followers' development and on indirect followers' performance than did the leaders in the control group.
This paper argues that creative behavior requires an employee to be willing to engage risk. Aside from the discussion of risk propensity as an individual difference, a new situational variable will be developed and tested: willingness to take risks (WTR). WTR captures the employee's willingness to engage risks in their work and is positioned as an important influence on creative behavior. The results of a field study indicate that WTR is a significant predictor of employee creativity and, in addition, mediates the relationship between encouragement and creativity. The results are discussed in light of the current literature on employee creativity.
Creativity is increasingly recognized as a key component to success in the workplace. This article explores the detection of creative potential in managers. In a first part, creative potential is defined and a multivariate approach concerning the psychological resources for creativity is presented. Then, in a second part, an application of this approach to the detection of creative potential of managers is proposed, with two empirical illustrations. The profile of cognitive and conative characteristics associated with creative managers is examined and contrasted with the profile for a different line of work, creative design. In a further study, managers completed several creative thinking divergent production tasks, the results of which showed some task specificity. Thus, the profile for managerial creativity varies, to some extent, with the kind of managerial task, rather than being a general ability.
The Creative Environment Scales Work Environment Inventory (WEI) is a new paper‐and‐pencil instrument designed to assess stimulants and obstacles to creativity in the work environment. Unlike many instruments that are designed as comprehensive descriptions of the work environment, the WEI focuses on those factors in the work environment that are most likely to influence the expression and development of creative ideas. Designed to be used at any level within any function of an organization, the WEI is intended as an organizational development instrument to improve the climate for creativity. Conceptually grounded in previous empirical and theoretical work on creativity and innovation, the WEI has been administered to 645 respondents drawn from five different groups. Factor analyses, scale reliabilities (internal consistencies), and between/within scale correlations indicate a high degree of integrity in the WEI scales. Furthermore, test‐retest reliability is high. Preliminary validity analyses indicate that the WEI does discriminate between different work environments, and that some of the scales are significantly related to creativity within the organization.
This study examined the independent and joint contributions of employees' creativity-relevant personal characteristics and three characteristics of the organizational context - job complexity, supportive supervision, and controlling supervision - to three indicators of employees' creative performance: patent disclosures written, contributions to an organization suggestion program, and supervisory ratings of creativity. Participants (171 employees from two manufacturing facilities) produced the most creative work when they had appropriate creativity-relevant characteristics, worked on complex, challenging jobs, and were supervised in a supportive, noncontrolling fashion.
The following re-conceptualisation of vocational expertise is premised on reconciling contributions from cognitive psychology with those from social and cultural theories of thinking and acting. Relations between the individuals acting and the social practice in which they act are proposed as bases for knowing and performance — knowing in practice. Domains of knowledge are held to be products of reciprocal and interpretative construction arising from individuals' engagement in social practice, rather than being abstracted disciplinary knowledge or disembedded sociocultural tools. The construction of the individuals' domains of vocational practice is constituted reciprocally through their participation at work. Some implications for curriculum are also proposed.
In a survey of 2,200 individuals, the authors examined the degree to which work environments are structured to complement the creative requirements of jobs. Regression analyses indicated that proximal job characteristics were more strongly associated with a combined objective and perceptual measure of job-required creativity than were distal organizational characteristics. Furthermore, higher job satisfaction and lower intentions to leave were found for individuals whose work environments complemented the creative requirements of their jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Academy of Management Journal is the property of Academy of Management and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
We propose that problem‐solving demand (PSD) is an important job attribute for employees' creative performance. Applying job design theory, we examined the relationship between PSD and employee creativity. The theorised model was tested with data obtained from a sample of 270 employees and their supervisors from three Chinese organisations. Regression results revealed that PSD was positively related to creativity, and this relationship was mediated by creative self‐efficacy. Additionally, intrinsic motivation moderated the relationship between PSD and creative self‐efficacy such that the relationship was stronger for individuals with high rather than low intrinsic motivation. We discuss our findings, implications for practice, and future research.
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