If What You Want is not What You Get: A Communication-Based Approach to Top Managers' Intended Firm Creativity and Employees' Failure to Deliver

There often exists a gap between the level of creativity aimed for by the company's top managers and the level actually realized. In this article, we draw on Speech Act Theory and the Jakobsonian model of communication to investigate the reasons for this gap. We identify the top managerial as well as organizational conditions that shape and determine the way in which actors interpret information. By means of configuration analysis, we identify eight distinct configurations, which represent stable paths to reach the top managers' intended level of firm creativity. As the main contribution of this paper, we explain the reasons for the distance between the intended firm creativity by the top managers and the actually realized creative solutions by the workforce. This paper makes a further contribution to the interpretive approach in creativity management by highlighting the importance of speech acts.