Abstract
This issue is fundamentally a mini-special issue on two topics—creativity and ethics. I see these two topics as vitally important for organizations today, and for the HRD professionals who are often charged with developing both within organizations. I once argued that the future of HRD was dependent upon scholar practitioners being creative about engaging in practices that not only model but also facilitate ethical and just behaviors (Callahan, 2007). The authors of the articles presented in this issue take a step toward achieving that goal.
Joo, McLean, and Yang (2013) look at commonalities across a decade of empirical research in creativity and innovation and make recommendations for future HRD research. In particular, they argue that more attention should be given to the use of Person–Environment (PE) fit when exploring creativity. To facilitate such an agenda, they offer a conceptual framework that links individual and contextual constructs identified from empirical studies of creativity. They argue that creativity is not a solely individual characteristic, but is dependent upon a wide variety of contextual factors that can be influenced by HRD intervention—such as job (re)design, organizational culture building, coaching, and career development.
Loewenberger (2013) also looks at creativity. However, instead of exploring the broader literature on creativity and innovation in management publications, she explores the state of creativity literature within the field of HR and HRD specifically. Like Joo and his colleagues, Loewenberger recognizes that individuals alone cannot simply be creative in a vacuum. Her assessment of the HRD literature, with a few exemplars from the broader HR/HRM field, suggests similar outcomes to that stemming from the article by Joo and his colleagues. Development, awareness raising, training in problem solving, and climate and culture development are but a few of her recommendations. These two articles took distinct starting points to explore the state of creativity literature, and yet they found similar avenues of action for HRD professionals. Although the authors of these two articles on creativity do not take an explicit critical HRD perspective, their ideas about how to build creativity in individuals through a creative environment sets the stage for a critical constructionist HRD to flourish.
After the two integrative literature reviews on creativity, Ardichvili’s (2013) article introduces us to ethics at the corporate level. Much like Loewenberger’s contention that awareness must be raised for creativity to flourish, Ardichvili also argues that awareness is a cornerstone for challenging dominant power structures in organizations. Grounded in critical-oriented sociological theory, the model Ardichvili offers helps HRD professionals identify leverage points for creating a culture of ethical behavior and decision making. He begins with individual characteristics and moral virtue, but moves outward from there to look at organizational and environmental factors that influence ethical outcomes—a more macro look at ethical behavior.
Noelliste (2013), however, begins with the individual and goes deeper into the factors that create ethical individuals. She focuses primarily on the individual within a context and looks at the role of integrity development as the building block of ethical and unethical psyches. Hers is a micro look at interpersonal dynamics of ethics. These two works on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and integrity demonstrate how difficult it can be to challenge the power structures that lend themselves to the creation of ethical scandals that transcend organizations and even threaten world economies. To be effective at challenging dominant power structures, to break out of the habitus of individuals’ dominated positions, creativity is an essential tool. Understanding what factors facilitate creativity, and how to enact those, are important for subsequently facilitating ethical workers and workplaces.
Finally, Collins (2013) wraps up the issue with an instructor’s corner piece that offers a road map for one way of helping people learn how to use their creativity to confront dominant power structures. He provides a three-step process for teaching critical perspectives—illustrating relevance, questioning norms, and creating space.
This issue brings together dominant and critical perspectives that, together, can serve as a foundation for enacting critical constructionist HRD (Callahan, 2007). But I think we need to go further. The articles in this issue hint at the reflexivity required of scholars and practitioners within the field of HRD, but their focus tends to be on the outcomes of practice. To what extent are we, as HRD professionals, complicit in fostering environments that are hostile to creativity and fraught with unethical behavior (Callahan, 2006)? How are we being creative with the ways we think about our practice, our teaching, and our research? Is our discourse reinventing the dominant power structures, or are we challenging those structures and questioning who we are serving as we train individuals to become more creative?