Poster Paper: Culture of Creativity and Innovation in Local Government: The Mediating Role of Agency's Brokerage Position in Interagency Networks

Thursday, November 6, 2014
Ballroom B (Convention Center)

*Names in bold indicate Presenter

Jooho Lee, University of Nebraska and Soonhee Kim, KDI School of Public Policy and Management
Under the leadership of the former mayor for the City of Seoul, Creative Governance was established as a broad goal of government innovation. To achieve this goal, the City of Seoul has adopted various innovative programs. One of programs focused on creating a creativity-driven organizational culture by, for example, encouraging employees to take a ‘think outside of the box’ approach to solve complex urban governance issues and challenges. While a growing number of studies have identified the factors affecting the level of creativity and innovation in private organizations, little is known about the relationship between a culture of creativity and innovation in public organizations. Creativity often refers to a generation of novel and useful ideas while innovation refers to the implementation of creative ideas. Creative ideas do not implement themselves. Creativity and innovation literature has emphasized coordinated actions for implementing creative ideas among agencies. Concerning the importance of interagency coordination for implementing creative ideas, this paper shows that social network literature is useful to better understand how the structural characteristics of agencies facilitate or inhibit interagency coordination to translate its creative ideas into innovation. In social network literature, with few exceptions, scholars have primarily paid attention to the role of actors’ structural characteristics in shaping their behaviors and actions. Thus, social network scholars have called for research on the effects of interaction between actors’ structural characteristics and attributes on their behaviors. The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of both an organizational culture and structure and their interaction on agency-level innovations in a multiagency government organization. We argue that effective innovation often needs appropriate mechanisms for translating an agency’s culture of creativity into effective innovation. In this research, we focuses on the roles an agency’s brokerage position have in the relationship between an agency’s culture of creativity and innovation. By applying Burt’s structural holes theory, this research claims that an agency’s brokerage position affects how an agency’s culture of creativity is translated into its innovation output. This is because an agency’s network position affects the extent to which an agency gains access to and recombines creative ideas constructed in different local context and fosters interagency coordination. We test the research model empirically by using the network and survey data collected from managers in the City of Seoul in 2009. The interagency network data and survey data on perceived culture of creativity were collected from agency managers. In order to minimize mono-method bias, data on each agency-level innovation was collected from the senior managers who oversee agencies. Various control variables (e.g. perceived work environment) were included in the model to control compounding effects. This research makes a contribution to public management literature by shedding light on the role of interagency networks on innovation. Also, we advance our knowledge in network literature by responding to a recent call for research on how the interaction between the characteristics of interagency networks and an agency’s attributes affect its innovation.