CREATIVITY IN ORGANIZATIONS - AN ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVE

The concept of creativity has been interpreted by management specialists in many ways. This paper aims to outline the perception of the Romanian academic environment on how this concept is materialized in organizations. Therefore, we developed a research study based on a questionnaire administered in the Romanian universities. The respondents belonged to one of two groups: a group of PhD students and another group consisting of academics who teach managerial subjects. The findings of this research demonstrate that some of the features and ways of expressing creativity are accepted by the respondents, but to some of them it causes confusion. We infer that for a beneficial change to take place in organizations regarding the understanding and use of creativity, it is necessary to convince the academic environment about the modern features of creativity. In the organization, creativity management should take similar steps to those of general management: planning the development of organizational creativity, organizing the activities that can stimulate and protect creative ideas, coordinating changes required by the creative organizational climate and controlling results generated by increasing the creative power of the human resource. This will increase the impact of creativity on organizations. On the other hand, creativity must be mainly used for improving the quality of products and changing the employees' and managers' attitude towards the client.