(Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Creativity and Sustainability: Some Intersections
2.1. Creativity
2.2. The Sustainability of Creative Processes
2.3. Studying Sustainable Creativity in the Finnish Technology Sector
3. Materials and Methods
3.1. Aim and Research Questions
- How is creativity described by managers and employees working in the Finnish technology sector?
- What can we infer about the sustainability of creative practices from managers’ and employees’ descriptions of creativity?
- What are the similarities and differences both among and between managers’ and employees’ descriptions when it comes to the issues above?
3.2. Participants
3.3. Data Collection
3.4. Data Analysis
4. Results
4.1. Managers’ Descriptions of Creativity
4.1.1. The positions of Business, Society, and Customers
“The creativity is that it makes people’s lives easier, because the information system shouldn’t make people’s lives more difficult, but it should make people’s lives easier”.(CEO, Tech)
“When I talk about innovation and that development, we are specifically trying to find solutions that could be sold elsewhere in the world. Therefore, it is important that we understand what the world needs and whether there are similar needs to those in Finland”.(Innovation manager, Build)
4.1.2. The Perspectives of Big-C Creativity and Innovation
“Creativity is easy to find in these new services like Uber, they are so easy, I think it is the creativity of our time, to come up with these kinds of services”.(CEO, Tech)
“Theoretically, we have three development programs, within all three there is a belief that this industry is changing and that we can scale ourselves larger by combining new technology [for the construction industry] and bringing new ways of working for people”.(HR manager, Build)
4.2. Employees’ Descriptions of Creativity
4.2.1. The Positions of Customer, Employee, and Colleague
“Consults are needed when a customer has a problem that needs a solution and if we go there with a ready patent solution, well, that is not necessarily a good option, and one [consult] must be able to apply and adapt different things”.(Consultant, Tech)
“It is typical that the customer comes to us with the problem, sometimes they even come up with a solution that, ‘Hey, we have a solution to our problem here and we want you to take it and’ … then we usually want to take a couple of steps back and go back to the problem”.(Software developer, Tech)
4.2.2. The Perspectives of Little-c Creativity and Daily Problem-Solving
“It is a constant problem-solving, and creativity is like two things: A, that you can solve the problem and B, that you can solve it in a way that someone else understands what you have done, and it’s like somebody else can sometimes maintain it”.(Software developer, Tech)
“But in the technical sense, first, we break down that big problem into smaller problems, and those smaller problems typically have existing solutions, or at least a similar problem from which to apply its new solution”.(Software developer, Tech)
4.3. Sustainability in Managers’ Creativity Descriptions
4.3.1. Creative Destruction or Saving the Environment through Digitalization
“It is a very simple creativity in my mind that we converted that old way of doing, and we do things with the computer. It’s digitalization—that is, doing things in a new way, then being creative, forgetting old processes. A simple example is admission tickets: first, there was always a paper ticket, bought from a kiosk, then so that some printer could print it somewhere, at some point they could be ordered on a computer but still had to get the paper. Nowadays, those paper tickets and stickers and others have been ignored, much of that process has been dropped, and all it took was that someone in our field was creative”.(CEO, Tech)
4.3.2. Big Changes and Continuous Development as Challenges for Sustainability
“We are constantly changing our organizational structures that do not exist, so nobody knows what that change is about and what it meant, that is, everyone’s perception of how to do it are a bit different, in a way it makes it really interesting but also super consuming. Each person has his or her own development project, and no one knows what they are or if they are still running. I just want to ask, is there someone in this organization who knows in what direction is this company going? My fear is that we are trying to change everything except leadership, and thus all our developing and everything is just ‘beautiful speech’”.(HR manager, Build)
4.4. Sustainability in Employees’ Creativity Descriptions
4.4.1. Creative Recycling—Applying Old Solutions
“In my opinion, it’s a kind of a creativity to combine those earlier solutions. Or there may be a solution to a problem that is quite different, but you can apply it to other and different ways, but it is a work of definition that when it is found what the problem is, what it solves, how it moves to how it is solved. It is very difficult in this world to come up with something completely new”.(Software developer, Tech)
“I may have this kind of idea of some application, but very rarely is it unique”.(Developer, Build)
4.4.2. Long-Lasting Solutions and Consequences
“Software design is somehow creative … I would argue … that many times you could do something a million different ways, but that … would figure out how to do it so it’s quite effective and long lasting, it solves and works as desired”.(Software developer, Tech)
“When someone else reads your solution, they understand how you did it, and they can continue or change it and understand what has happened there before”.(Software developer, Tech)
“You should take into account the effects of a possible change in their solution. That even if this fixes this point right now, will it break something else?”.(Software developer, Tech)
5. Discussion
Author Contributions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Lemmetty, S.; Glăveanu, V.P.; Collin, K.; Forsman, P. (Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector. Sustainability 2020, 12, 3605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093605
Lemmetty S, Glăveanu VP, Collin K, Forsman P. (Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector. Sustainability. 2020; 12(9):3605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093605
Chicago/Turabian StyleLemmetty, Soila, Vlad Petre Glăveanu, Kaija Collin, and Panu Forsman. 2020. "(Un)Sustainable Creativity? Different Manager-Employee Perspectives in the Finnish Technology Sector" Sustainability 12, no. 9: 3605. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12093605