Season 3 - Episode 11 | Expert Insights: Research on Creativity and Innovation, and Impact of AI and WFH: Professor Roy Chua (Singapore)

Welcome to an Expert Special Edition on creativity and innovation research in Asia, and the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Work From Home (WFH) trends, brought to you by Dr. Ramesh and Professor Roy Chua, who is a Professor of Organisational Behaviour at the Singapore Management University (SMU) – Lee Kong Chian School of Business.

Prof. Chua delves into the evolving research of creativity and innovation, exploring the impact of AI, the shift to WFH practices on organisations, culture and gender. Join us to understand the opportunities and challenges posed by these dynamics.

3 Key Insights from this Podcast:

1. Gender Gaps in Creativity Achievements: Novelty avoidance and the implications on success in the creativity realm. 
2. Transformational vs. Transactional Leadership: How does each approach influence creativity, innovation and team performance?
3. The Future of Work: What skills do you need in the new AI enabled workforce and to navigate the challenges arising from the Work From Home trend?

Host: Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra, Author, Podcast Host, Founder of Talent Leadership Crucible & Founder of Impact Velocity

Guest Speaker: Professor Roy Chua, Professor of Organisational Behaviour & Human Resources, Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University

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Transcript

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 00:00

Welcome to the Thriving in the Age of Disruption podcast series, Roy. I'm really excited that we can have this conversation today. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 00:07

Thank you so much, Ramesh for having me on this program. My name is Roy Chua. I am a Professor of Organisational Behavior at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business at Singapore Management University (SMU). A big area of my research has to do with creativity and innovation in organisations. In the early part of my career, I was really interested in how culture shapes creativity and innovation. But more recently, I moved into studying how women innovate in organisations. My Undergrad was in Computer Science, although this is very different from what I'm doing now, I thought it's actually very good groundwork for me going forward, because besides these two topics, I am also beginning to study AI and creativity. So right now, these are the three things that I am focusing my research on culture, gender and AI, all related to creativity and innovation. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 01:06

That's really exciting, because these are all hot topics for people in the corporate space. When we look at creativity, we're looking at innovation and entrepreneurship. When we look at AI, we're looking at the new trends in terms of how people are going to work. And lastly, of course, we look at women and how they can play a larger role in organisations. Perhaps we can start off with some of the insights from your research for emerging women in leadership. What can you say that would work for them to move up the corporate ladder? 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 01:39

Women are very well represented these days. According to various statistics, women make up about 50% of the global workforce. However, if we look around, there appear to be some gender gaps in creative achievements between men and women. For example, if you look at, say, the field of architecture, a significant proportion of young architects, about 40% are women, but only 18% went on to win greatest awards in terms of patterns and stand achievements, women really were overshadowed. So, look at many of these examples detailing the achievement gaps between men and women when it comes to creativity. So, what does that mean? Does it mean that women are less creative than men? Fortunately, there is no reliable research that shows that women are inherently less creative than men. In fact, a lot of research that administer various kinds of creativity tests found that men and women are equally created when we ask them to generate ideas. However, the gender gap merges when we go beyond the idea generation stage. So, for example, in one of my research we were looking at Idea selection, when ideas are generated very often there are multiple ideas, and we cannot implement every single idea, and not every single idea is worth implementing. So, people have to decide which idea to pursue, especially in organizations, and this is where we see a systematic gender gap. We found that when people want to select ideas to implement, women seem to systematically select ideas that were less novel compared to men. So, if people were to generate a whole bunch of ideas, and if you can rank these ideas in terms of how normal they are, men have no problem selecting the most normal ideas that they have generated. Women tend to take ideas there are one or two notches down. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 03:42

So, this is a phenomenon we call novelty avoidance. So, it appears that women systematically avoid the most normal ideas, and that has implication later on in their success in the creativity realm. And why do women do that? According to our research, we found that one of the reasons that is causing women to systematically withhold their most novel idea is that there is concern about potential backlash. When people are pursuing very novel ideas, they often come across as highly ambitious, and this ambitious focus is incongruent with people's stereotype about women. I think people have no problem with ambitious men pursuing very new ideas, but they may not like women who are doing the same. It seems that women appear to understand this societal stereotype and systematically pull themselves back. That is what we have found. We have also found one potential way to circumvent this issue. We have done a series of experiments, and in one of the experiments, we told some of these participants in our studies who are the people who are going to be job. Judging them for their outputs, and we manipulate the gender representation of panels or experts that are going to evaluate their creative output. And we found that this novelty avoidance among women is especially prevalent when the panel is consisting of all men, but when we start to have more women on the judging panel, this novelty avoidance effect seems to go away. I think what this tells us is that there are things that organizations can do that can support women in the creativity, innovation process. I am having a more gender balance evaluation panel, having more role model and support for women, all of these would be helpful for them to express their more novel ideas. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 05:47

Wow, that's really a significant finding, because women have the capacity to come up with novel ideas, but it's just that they don't give themselves the permission to share these openly because they fear the backlash. As a woman myself, I've been in situations where I've downplayed sometimes what I want to do just to stay safe. The next topic is really about creativity and innovation, and what do you see in terms of trends for developed and developing countries from your research?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 06:20

So, I think the hottest idea this day is AI. Everybody is talking about AI, and I'm sure many of us have experimented with AI ourselves, using ChatGPT and various other AI enabled programs. I think promise of artificial intelligence is great that you can take over a lot of thinking that previously, that we need humans to do. But I think one area that AI may not have fully accomplished or reach its full potential is in the realm of creativity, because creativity is about deviation from the norms, whereas AI, at this stage, is still very much about finding patterns from big data. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 07:09

But I see that even though these two things are going in different directions, there is potential for collaboration between human and AI. So, I am beginning, actually a new program of research, and we don't have any data yet, but we are beginning to start to look at this area. That is how human, and AI can collaborate to do creative work. So, I think AI has certain advantages. It has access to a large amount of data that no human could ever hold in their brain. AI has very good search ability that they can search around the data set in all kinds of ways and discover things that humans may not be able to discover on their own. So, AI has a lot of bandages that if human were to partner with AI, they are better at coming up with novel and useful solutions. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 08:04

It's interesting that you are looking at this area because I had recently enrolled for a two-week program on how to use AI effectively in the workplace to save 40% of my time. And one of the things that everyone discussed in that program was how they could use, whether it was ChatGPT or other AI programs, to do the initial researching. So, if you are someone who writes a blog which is 2000 words, then you have AI as your partner to research some of the topics. Maybe it also provides a skeleton for you. It then reduces the time that you normally would take to write the article. But when you're talking about creativity, I guess you're looking beyond just articles or blogs or presentations, and more a product or a service that can come out from that creativity,

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 08:56

or even just new ideas that are usable the kind of AI we know today are very useful if we want to do a little bit more mundane work. For example, writing an email, writing a speech, AI can give us a good first draft and then we can improve on it, and that would probably save us a lot of time. But those of us who have used AI enough also knows that AI, like chat, GPT makes a lot of mistakes, and that is very dangerous, because it might make things up and sound very authoritative about it, but it is entirely wrong. So, I think scientists are trying to develop AIs that are more accurate. So, by training them with more data, by improving their machine learning engines, you can make AI more accurate, but when AI becomes more accurate, it also means that it is lens created because it is adhering to desired regularity in a closed manner. That is the potential that the more accurate AIs become, then it is very good at giving you the right. Answer, but it's not necessarily going to give you a creative answer. There might be a bit of trade off there, which I think, if you go back to the whole fundamental performance of creativity, it is about deviation from the norm. The AI work now is still about making something that fits the data. It's about probability that has that's so fundamentally they are actually going in two different directions. It may take a while for it to be truly creative, but we can begin to harness its creative potential by having a human collaborate with it. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 10:35

Of course. What it also means is that if you as an individual is creative, and you know how to harness the power of AI, you're in a better position.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 10:45

So if you want to talk about the future of work and what skills you need for young people in the new AI enabled workforce, I think the ability to work with AI creatively is a very important skill, not just able to use AI to write the right prong, to get the right answer, but to develop skill set to collaborate with AI to come up with creative, innovative solutions. I think that will be a very important skill.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 11:18

Let me move on now to corporate culture, because it's an area where people are interested to improve the effectiveness of a company as well as its performance. What has your research shown about culture? 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 11:30

I have spent a lot of time studying the impact of culture on creativity. One dimension of culture that I have studied extensively is the concept called cultural tightness. Cultural tightness refers to the extent that a society has a lot of rules and norms. People get punished if they deviate from these rules and norms. So initial research on cultural tightness and creativity suggests that tighter cultures appear to be less creative, because if you were to deviate from these rules and norms, you get punished.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 12:04

 So, after a while, become prevention focused, they become careful, they become cautious. They do not want to rock the boat too much. And they are also unable to think outside the box, because over time, whenever they think outside the box, they get slapped or punished the baseline argument is that applied culture is not conducive for creativity. However, more recent research has begun to revise this view. For example, one of my papers that was published in 2019 where we studied auto tightness of the 31 provinces in mainland China, we found that a tight culture is indeed bad for radical innovation, but it actually surprisingly helps incremental innovation. So, provinces that are very tight in China seem to suffer on the radical innovation aspect thrive on the incremental innovation aspect. In this study, we measured innovation using patent data released by the Chinese government, whereas the Chinese government categorized patterns into the more radical type of patterns and also the more incremental type of patterns. But more recently, I have a project that looks at cultural tightness in organizations. Because what I have been describing earlier was cultural tightness at the country level, at the province level, but we are beginning to now study at organizational level, and here I make a further distinction terms of where kept this comes from. Because in an organization, tightness can come from different places. I broadly categorize them into formal versus informal. Formal culture tightness would be the kind of rules, punishment and sanctions that arise from formal organizational processes. So, for example, a lot of companies will have policies and rules and regulations about what employees can and cannot do, and they are also associated punishment or reward for doing certain things. It a company's culture is tight because of this formal regulation. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 14:18

We call it formal culture blindness, but an organization is made of people, and when they are people, they'll always be informal social interaction, and sometimes there will be informal social norms that arise. So, these are not written down explicitly by the company, but over time, the group of people in the company have evolved to value a certain set of norms, and they follow by that set of norms. And people do get punished if they leave it from this informal norm. And here the punishment could be more social, is social disapproval and so on. And this is what we call informal culture tightness. So, both are cultural tightness. Both regulate behaviors. Both create rules and norms and punish you for deviation, but they come from different places. An interesting question for us is, which aspect of cultural tightness, the former or the informal one, has a greater impact on creativity? So that was the question that we were trying to ask. Can you give a guess? Ramesh, 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 15:21

I think it would be formal, because that's what people are more scared about. But if someone actually truly creative, they have learned how to maneuver inside of those informal processes and norm.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 15:35

I think many people would guess that formality in terms of bureaucracy would kill creativity. But interestingly, our data, we found that it was really the informal tightness that is the killer, not formal tightness. When a company has a lot of formal rules and regulations, employees sometimes find ways to circumvent that. You have all this paperwork that I need to do to get approval. People can find ways to circumvent that. But when the disapproval comes from a social aspect you are in a community, coworkers would shunt you or would ostracize you if you do things differently, if this is the kind of culture that you're breathing in, day in and out, I think that is the one that would, over time, silence your creative voice. So, our data seems to be showing that is the informal aspect of constraint that kills organizational creativity, and not so much the bureaucracy. I think a lot of people would think that is the bureaucracy that will kill creativity.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 16:43

I have two questions about it. One is, what have you seen about family businesses? Because family businesses generally have more informal rules, and from my perspective, the professionals who know how to navigate these informal norms and become part of the inner group are successful in our creative which is what I did in my thesis. So that's why I was looking at it from that perspective. But more importantly, what you've talked about in terms of the social aspect, I think, is a nuance to what I originally assumed. Because the fear of not being able to go out to lunch with somebody because you're an outlier is a very big fear, because we want to belong in an organization. I wonder now, with people working from home and other changes that we are seeing, whether this will continue to persist because we don't have that opportunity to interact as much.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 17:37

Yeah, we can talk about work from home here in a bit, but I really like your idea of lending this to family businesses. I think you are right in pointing out that in family businesses, the social informal norms are especially strong because these are family relationships the family over decades of building up their businesses have evolved a set of informal norms and sanctions, and these are usually not codified or explicitly written down, maybe 10 businesses would have more of a challenge innovating compared to more formal organizations without this overlaying or informal social family Relationships, right?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 18:20

 So, I think it's actually a very interesting direction to go into. So, thank you for giving me that idea. I think going forward, I might look into family businesses and creativity, but from a social, informal perspective, your point about work from home is interesting. Even though the pandemic is over from home has become the norm for many people, although companies trying to get people to go back, but employees now have tasted the sweetness of working for coal, and they don't want to go back. So, with what my DBA student, Andrew Han, who just graduated, and we coauthored a piece that is recently published, and a California Management Review insights that addresses this exact topic of working from home and creativity, that was really his dissertation as well. And in that piece of research, we found that working from home is actually that for creativity, because creativity is not a solo process. Creativity is not a person sitting at home under a tree coming up with a new idea. It is never that way. It is, more often than not, about collaboration, about bouncing ideas, about serendipity, about unexpected conversations. These are very difficult. If you're not at the workplace, you can work from home and you can schedule zoom meetings, but we typically schedule unexpected chitchat. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 19:51

We get our thing done, and then we move on. So, if you work from home a lot, then the data that we collected, we found that. People's creativity actually drop, and then we actually use real world field data in automobile company that has branches in both Germany and China, and we found that this effect is even stronger in China than Germany, because I think maybe in China, a lot of this social relationship plays an even more important role when it comes to exchange of ideas, right? So, if you take that away by working from home, it is going to have a more negative impact. And going back to the role of gender and women, we also found in this data that working from home is worse for women than men. And why is that? You can think of many reasons. I think one could be that women have more duties, so to speak, at home and be more distracted by other duties besides work. But if you were to put aside that the way men and women communicate are also different, I think women rely comparatively more on contextual factors. You look at more factors when you are interacting one another and working from home, just take away a lot of these contextual factors that makes communication harder. What we have in our data is telling us that working from home is bad for creativity and it's worse for women and it's worse for Chinese versus Germans and so on. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 21:25

Very interesting. Just working from home in the Asian context might be worse for creativity generally, for companies here, 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 21:33

Yes.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 21:33

As well as for women, yeah. When you look at successful organizations, how would you describe that organization, as a thriving organization, and generally, what do you also see at the organization level and an individual level? 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 21:49

A lot of times, senior management may have a set of strategy vision, but the rest of the organization, very often, is about checking all boxes that are relevant to them. And different departments try to check different boxes because they have different KPIs. But sometimes these KPIs do not necessarily lie. So, to me, that is not a driving organization. It seems that everybody is checking their own boxes. We talk to HR. HR has its own KPI. Finance has its KPI even though we are all supposed to work towards common goal. But because of the defenses in this KPI, sometimes things are with one another. This is one common problem in a lot of organizations, the lack of alignment towards the overall strategy and vision, some form of alignment is to be critical here. When people are just checking their own boxes, they do not see the bigger picture. The kind of ideas that they generate may not necessarily solve larger organization problem, right? It may solve a very local problem. So, for example, finance would come up with a set of rules and new changes to make a process more efficient. In doing so, they may cripple other aspects of the organization. I think that's one thing that, again, by checking their own boxes, might have a detrimental impact on creating.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 23:27

I think it's really cool that you raised these two points, because in our consulting work, in managing corporate culture transformation, what we found is the lack of alignment causes silo like behavior, and that it's very necessary not only to create that strategy or the vision, but to cascade it down to all levels that there is ownership within the whole company to that output that the company wants to focus on. And the second part you called out that people operate from their perspective of, let's say, my function or my team, and it's almost like there is a lack of systems view. What's the bigger picture? What's the ramification or the big impact on the organization as a whole? That's one of the key things that we also work on, which is to ensure that organizations have systems awareness. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 24:17

That's a very good way to put it, because different parts of organizations are inevitably interconnected, but very often, people don't see the impact of their own action on other aspects of the organization. They only see the impact within their own department, within their own function. I think that is a career problem with a lot of organizations like you say silos and not having a systems mindset.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 24:49

We talked about it in terms of the organizational challenge, but when you look at leadership, with the senior management team, or even at a general manager level, what is. It that I as an individual can do to operate more effectively in my organization in spite of whatever that is happening around us. Is there anything that you see from your research that sets the good managers apart from those who are not really effective? 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 25:16

Oh, it's big from the perspective of innovation and creativity <huh sound from RR>, I did have a recent paper that looked at the types of leadership style and employee creativity. So, I think traditionally, people would say that transformational leadership is good for creativity, right? Because if you're a transformational leader, you're more likely to inspire and stimulate your employees to higher goals, to challenge status quo and all that. And that should be good for creativity.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 25:49

And indeed, we found that in our research, a lot of times, people neglect to study the or companion leadership style, which is transactional leadership style, but transactional leadership style is one that is about adhering to rules or making sure that things work as defined, and people are punished again they deviate from this rule. So, it sounds a lot like a culture tightness that we about earlier. One would expect that if you're transactional leader, you would put creativity, and again, we found that pattern of result. But what was more interesting in our recent work was that we begin to compare which has a greater impact, the empowering aspect of transformational leadership or the inhibiting aspects of transactional leadership. So, if a leader were to choose to do one thing, do more transformational leadership behavior, or cut down on transactional leadership behavior. Which one should they focus? Oh, can you make a guess?

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 26:51

I would say it depends on the situation of the company and what they're dealing with, because at times you need to enforce inhibiting actions, and at times you need to motivate people.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 27:03

Of course, I think a lot of this depends on the situation in terms of a main effect, we interestingly found that inhibiting aspect of transactional leadership is stronger than the enabling effect conservation leadership, if as the leader, you can only do one thing. You got too busy. You can't do both things. Our research seems to suggest that cutting down on all this transactional leadership behavior would enable creativity to a greater degree than trying to be a transformational leader. Of course, it can be transformational. That's great, but it's hard actually, for everybody to be trans, but it's relatively easier for us to be less emboldened to rules and regulations and maybe be a little bit more relaxed about these rules when it comes to implementation.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 27:54

 And that's also important, because when you talk about innovation, timeline is critical, a transactional leader would be very effective in ensuring that you meet your product launch or whatever that you want to actually deliver to the marketplace. I want to ask a couple of questions just to get to know you. What's your favorite book?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 28:17

My many favorite books. There's no one favorite book, but a book that I'm reading right now is actually a Chinese science fiction book called the Three Body Problem. It has recently been to make into a Netflix drama series. And it is interesting because it is taking your traditional alien invasion sci fi kind of genre to a new level. I think, if aliens were going to invade us, what are some of the things that humans would be doing? Some people would think about maybe we should just try to fight off the aliens. Some people want to collaborate with the aliens, because the alien they know things that we do not know. So that's creative collaboration. And then there is this extreme group of people who may feel that the world is such a mess, so please destroy us so that we can start a new one. what interests me about this book is that it's really the spectral of human reactions during crisis.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 28:17

Wow. Excellent. And what's your favorite travel destination?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 28:25

I travel around the world a lot. Again, I wouldn't say I have a favorite destination. I think Asia is a great place that I like to visit various places. Then I was in Hanoi,

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 29:33

Kkay, yes.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 29:35

Last year, a very charming place. And recently, I just came back from Penang, you would think that it is so warm in Singapore, that's where I was wrong. But I have never been to Penang until recently. So, I think Asia has a lot of great destination to offer.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 29:51

That's right. And if you can have dinner with anyone, who would it be?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 29:55

Oh, have dinner with you. Ramesh,

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 29:57

Thank you. We'll do that when I'm back in Singapore.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 30:00

Yes, of course,

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 30:00

Let's do that. And if you could have any superpower, what would it be?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 30:05

Any superpower? I would love to be able to read minds. 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 30:10

Okay! And what's the best advice that you've ever received?

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 30:13

Value your health? I think that's the most important thing we can talk about. Doing all kinds of things to transform organizations to do this and that, but you do not have a healthy body all of these meaningless 

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 30:28

That's right, because I did my doctorate at SMU, and you were my thesis professor, and you talked a lot about the value of doing a PhD or a doctorate, I wonder whether you could share that with the listeners.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 30:40

Yes, indeed. I think doing a PhD very big undertaking, very often it takes four to five, sometimes six, seven years. So, people often ask, why would any executive in the right frame of mind do something like that? But having run a professional doctorate program for many years and having supervised learning dissertation done by senior executives like yourself, I found that doing a PhD, especially for senior executives, has very distinct values, because as senior executives, you are often fighting fire. You're often trying to solve one problem to another. You do not have a lot of time to sit down and think through a set of problem very deeply. Doing a PhD gives you the training to think through a problem very deeply, very systematically, and also to apply the rigor of scientific inquiry to problem solving. A lot of times when people solve, probably organizations about addressing the symptoms, so that we put out this fire, so that we can go on to the next fire. 

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 31:51

But I think a PhD makes you engage a problem more deeply. I think that's one very useful thing. And as a result, people who have graduated from this kind of executive doctorate degrees, I find they are more critical thinkers compared to the past, and they also read and write better, right? And they communicate better, because in a PhD, we often require our students to write in a very precise manner, not be big able to defend your point of view. So, I find that these are important skills that goes beyond completing a dissertation. These are really important life skills, if you like that any senior executives, if they have the time and inclination, should not shy away from acquiring.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 32:43

Yeah, I think I agree with that, having done my doctorate and experienced the change in how I think and how I look at a problem, it's more of a systems view, rather than just an isolated problem unrelated to other things.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 32:57

Absolutely.

Dr. Ramesh Ramachandra 32:58

Thank you, Professor Roy, we've enjoyed having you here in our podcast interview, and thank you so much for joining us.

Prof. Roy Chua SMU 33:06

Thank you so much, Ramesh.