Scope
The EAWOP Small Group Meeting on Innovation in Organizations, Initiative and Creativity: A Dialectic Perspective will be held at Psychology School, University of Valencia (Spain) from 19th-21st September 2013. The Small Group Meeting will feature top international scholars and experts on initiative, entrepreneurship and innovation in organisations as well as presentations by a relatively small number of academics with specific interest/expertise in this topic and will give all participants plenty of chance for debate and discussion.
Small Group Meeting Theme and Focus
Research on organizational innovation provided a big amount of interesting results about causes and consequences of innovation both at individual, team and organizational level, with main attention paid to performance. Nevertheless, a synthesis of results and clarification of what practices runs out in practice and what practices does not is needed. Also, there is the need to deep analyze other aspects of innovation, creativity and initiative in organizations and avoid routine research to understand possible unexpected effects of innovation. Exploring the more dysfunctional, conflictual, and counterproductive aspects of innovation and their impact on the psychological well-being will be one of the main focus of this SGM. Some of the questions and topics issued in the Small Group Meeting will be:
What have we learnt on how to develop innovations in organizations in practice? What conditions favor the development of innovations? What individual, group and organizational variables act as barriers for innovation?
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Innovation at different levels in organizations. From the innovative behaviors of individuals to innovative organizations.
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Beyond performance: Do innovation affect at workers well-being? How individuals cope with high demands on innovations?
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Beyond the “pro-innovation bias”: Are all effects of innovations good? Are there unexpected and counterproductive effects of innovations? How innovation could affect conflict, overload, failure or other disruptive results in organizations?
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Analyzing the dynamics of innovation at individual, team and organizational level. Do the same variables and factors affect different phases at the innovation process?
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Personal initiative and creativity as potential drives for organizational innovation.
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How to combine individual, group and organizational resources and capabilities to increase innovation benefits? Considering ambidexterity.
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Applying a dialectic perspective to innovation research.
Format
We plan a small-scale workshop over two days and a half, with 3 keynote addresses, 20 oral presentations and plenty of time for discussion. Exhibiting an additional amount of posters during the meeting will also be possible. There will be no registration fees.
Publication of Papers
The outcomes of the meeting will appear in the form of a position paper submitted to EJWOP. We hope that selected papers will be published in a special issue of an academic journal.
