ENTE3506: How Culture Shapes Creativity & Innovation in Business

This essay explores the contrasting viewpoints on creativity and innovation between East Asian and West Asian cultures, examining how these differences can influence business relationships. It delves into educational approaches to creativity, methods of measuring individual creativity, and differing attitudes toward creative individuals in both cultural contexts. The analysis highlights the East Asian emphasis on structured education and extrinsic motivation versus the Western Asian embrace of novelty and dynamism. Furthermore, it addresses how cultural values like collectivism and uncertainty avoidance can affect creative outputs and idea selection. The essay concludes that while both creativity and innovation are vital, cultural understanding and compromise are essential for successful international business collaborations in the era of globalization. Desklib offers a wealth of resources, including past papers and solved assignments, to aid students in their academic pursuits.

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There are increasing scholarly interest and debates on the viewpoints of creativity and
innovation. Innovation and creativity are considered to be fundamental for all the academic
disciplines as well as educational activities. The process of creativity is referred to one of the
most critical components for making sense of the learning experiences. On the other hand,
innovation can be thought as new ideas or new ways of looking towards some specific things,
products or methods, which have value. As per Perry-Smith and Mannucci (2017), creativity
as an active process that is very necessarily to be involved in the process of innovation.
However, this paper is going to elaborate on presenting a brief discussion on the different
viewpoints of creativity and innovation of different national cultures. With the same, by
shedding light on two countries, this paper shall explain how these different viewpoints can
affect business relationships between these two countries. The chosen countries or national
cultures for this purpose are East Asian cultures and West Asian cultures. It would further
compare these two cultures on the basis of three national comparison themes- a) educational
approaches to creativity, b) measuring individual creativity and c) differing attitudes to
creative individuals.
Educational approaches to creativity of the East Asian cultures and West Asian
cultures- The East Asian nations like China, Macau, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan etc. are
widely known for the high value that they place on the quality education. It is the foundation
for all the cultural values and it highly emphasize the education sectors, which has resulted in
economic growth of these countries. The difference in between the education system of the
Asian nations and the United States are really striking. However, every approach has
different benefits from which the other countries could learn. The East Asian countries often
seem to sacrifice the creativity because of the amount of repetition and memory work which
is expected. Often the Korean students are motivated by the social tradition and therefore, the
motivation is not intrinsic here. Instead, it is extrinsic. It is very critical as of the fact that the

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intrinsic motivation is conducive to the creativity. On the other hand, the extrinsic motivation
is detrimental in nature. In the Western parts of Asia like Kuwait, Iraq, Oman, Turkey, UAE,
Saudi Arabia etc., it is something that embodies success as well as the contemporary trends of
excitement and novelty (Amabile and Pratt 2016). When linked with the individuals, cities,
regions or enterprises, creativity is something that develops an immediate empathy and at the
same time, conveys a significant image of dynamism. The cultural productions, as one of the
significant tools for communication have charged with emotion and subjectivity have taken
part in the expression of social life ever since the origin of mankind. However, it is also to
note that there is lack of enthusiasm regarding education in the Western nations but the level
of creativity among this people is widely admired. Furthermore, as per Cheung (2017), it is
very harder for the East Asian countries than the Westerners to feel, think and act in creative
way. This is due to the fact that the Asian society is very tightly structured and organised and
is collectivistic and hierarchical in nature.
Measuring individual creativity of the people from East Asian cultures and West
Asian cultures- In East Asian countries the economic growth and innovation are inter-related
but the strength of this link is dependent on the type of innovation. Apart from the cultural
norms and values, the cultural knowledge could easily serve as a significant source of the
intellectual inspirations for evoking the creativity. For instance, the relation of the economic
growth along with the knowledge outputs like the trade marks, patents etc. is comparatively
stronger than the creative outputs, comprising of the outputs from creative industries.
Moreover, the members from the East Asian cultures have very higher tendency of
harmonizing the conflicts as compared to the Western cultures (Steffens et al. 2016). With the
same, they also compromise the contradictions by finding out a middle ground. Hence, the
East Asian participants were very less likely as compared to the Western participants for
reaping the creative advantages from their experience of contradictions and paradoxes (Leung

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et al. 2018). It is due to the fact that the practise of coordinating the conflicts discourages the
people from getting engaged in the integrative complex thinking for scrutinising the tensions
as well as for searching for a synthesis which fulfils the competing elements concurrently.
There are several evidences as well where it has been found that the individuals from the
Western part of the world have very higher creative performance. Notwithstanding this fact,
these outcomes are not that easy to interpret as the creativity is not something that can be said
as intrapersonal quality (Sampaio, Ladeira and Santini 2017). In fact, it is the result of the
person-environment interactivities. For instance, in the earlier studies, the researchers have
calculated the creative performance of the Israelis and the Singaporeans. These two groups
were similar in their overall performance while completing the task individually (McCarthy,
Chen and McNamee 2018). Notwithstanding this fact, when they were asked for working in
groups or as teams, the Singaporeans, as compared to the Israelis, produced lesser novel
ideas. With the same, the group of Singaporeans also elaborated more on the utilities of their
ideas instead of novelty (Kazadi, Lievens and Mahr 2016). One of the most possible
explanation is that while working in groups or teams, a person is more possibly to reference
the values and norms of their team and at the same time, they choose the ideas that are
perceived for being acceptable to the other team members. However, this effect is much more
prevalent in the Eastern Asian cultures where the team preferences and goals are given higher
emphasis as compared to the individual preferences.
Differing attitudes towards creative individuals- Consistent with the evidence that the
Western cultures tend to countersign the creativity-supporting practises and values, it is also
found that the bicultural Asian Americas are way more creative when primed of their
American cultural identity as compared to the Asian ones. Apart from the cultural norms and
values, the cultural knowledge could easily serve as a significant source of the intellectual
inspirations for evoking the creativity. Having an exposure to different cultures provides

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great advantages to the creative productions as it is demonstrated by the studies conducted by
Dong et al. (2017). As per the studies, the participants getting access to diverse cultural
knowledge have produced much more creative results. It is to note that creativity and
innovation are culture-bound. People across different cultures think of creativity differently
and the cultural values could easily dampen some types of outputs of innovation (Wong et al.
2016). The values like uncertainty avoidance, power distance, cultural tightness, collectivism
etc. could discourage the individuals from selecting the unique ideas for future improvement
and development at the time of selection of ideas. All these values decreases the anxiety and
conformity pressure over the ambiguities and this in turn, supports higher exploration of the
alternatives and the counter-normative approaches and ideas. It is also to note that the
impacts of the cultural values as well as that of the knowledge on the creativity are very
closely observed when the innovation and creativity are measured at national level. As per
Yates and de Oliveira (2016), making use of the multilevel data and the cross cultural one,
there are three articles in the present issue that could extend the understanding of the cross-
cultural psychology of the concept of creativity in significant ways. Adair and Xiong (2018)
have claimed that cultural value of the uncertainty avoidance is something that mediates the
differences of cross cultural in relative preference for the novelty and usefulness as an
important criteria for evaluating the creativity level.
From the above it can be stated that often, the terms “creativity” and “innovation” are
being used synonymously but there are some indispensable differences in between these two.
Creativity is a very powerful catch phrase. It is to note that creative is considered to be a
positive term in a society which keeps on aspire to innovate and progress. The differences in
the view points on creativity and innovation of the East and the West Asian countries could
affect the business relationships between the countries belonging from these two parts of the
world. In present world, compromising and coordinating is the key to success. Hence, both

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the countries need to compromise and coordinate at certain points. It is very essential for
expanding the business further in this era of globalisation. Overall, it cannot be denied that
for both these countries, both creativity and innovation is of a significant value. Creativity is
literally an important pillar for the process of innovation. Creativity by itself is not enough.
For getting the true benefits, one needs to do something with it and it needs innovation. It is
very obvious that the process or the way of doing something in a way that is modern is
innovation. It might demote to the incremental and the developing and revolutionary changes
in commodities, organisations and processes.

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References:
Amabile, T.M. and Pratt, M.G., 2016. The dynamic componential model of creativity and
innovation in organizations: Making progress, making meaning. Research in Organizational
Behavior, 36, pp.157-183.
Cheung, R.H.P., 2017. Teacher-directed versus child-centred: the challenge of promoting
creativity in Chinese preschool classrooms. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 25(1), pp.73-86.
Kazadi, K., Lievens, A. and Mahr, D., 2016. Stakeholder co-creation during the innovation
process: Identifying capabilities for knowledge creation among multiple
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Leung, A.K.Y., Liou, S., Miron-Spektor, E., Koh, B., Chan, D., Eisenberg, R. and Schneider,
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McCarthy, M., Chen, C.C. and McNamee, R.C., 2018. Novelty and Usefulness Trade-Off:
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Sampaio, C.H., Ladeira, W.J. and Santini, F.D.O., 2017. Apps for mobile banking and
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