Exploring Workplace Creativity and Innovation

When it comes to understanding creativity and innovation in the workplace, Robert H. Smith School of Business Dean’s Professor of Leadership and Innovation Vijaya Venkataramani knows from experience what challenges face employees and managers alike. Prior to her doctoral studies, Venkataramani worked in India as a human resources manager. It has partially inspired her award-winning research that was on display during a recent Distinguished Scholar-Teacher (DST) lecture series event.

Established in 1978 and sponsored by the University of Maryland’s Office of the Senior Vice President and Provost, the DST award and lecture series recognizes tenure faculty members for excellence in instruction and research. As a 2024 award recipient, Venkataramani delivered a DST series lecture to a Van Munching Hall audience on Feb. 19, 2025.

The program included remarks from Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs John Bertot: “In addition to her research, [Venkataramani] has contributed significantly to the University’s learning environment, engaging students in the courses that she teaches and through her mentorship.”

Introducing Venkataramani, Smith Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Dean’s Chair of Operations Management Wedad Elmaghraby described her colleague from nomination letters submitted by three leading scholars in the field and three students, with superlatives including “top in her field,” a “leader of thought in this space” and “among the very best scholars.”

“Dr. Venkataramani possesses the unique ability to create a nurturing and inclusive environment where every student feels valued and respected," said Elmaghraby, quoting one of the student letters.

“That’s inspirational, aspirational and so proud to have you as a colleague here,” Elmaghraby added, with her own sentiment.

Venkataramani began her lecture with background information about her research, which has focused on innovation in the workplace. “Understanding how organizations change and innovate has always excited me, (referencing her managerial work prior to graduate studies). “That experience exposed me to a lot of people and a lot of different situations that highlighted different approaches to facilitating innovation at work.”

It also sparked her to dive deeper into understanding what motivates employees to be more creative and how organizations can help to encourage this mindset. “I’m an organizational behavior scholar, so my work focuses on understanding the psychology behind what people do and why they do some things they do,” she said.

Venkataramani described her research as having evolved since she received tenure – from “narrowly focused on individual creativity” in developing ideas to also looking at how teams collectively create together as well as how these creative ideas are successfully implemented in enabling innovation. “The more I worked with organizations, the more I realized that [individual creativity] was just part of the story,” she said. “Innovation is not just about the individual, but a lot of times employees are extremely creative, but none of their ideas see the light of day.”

She described a common theme in her work as understanding how a person’s social network enables them to be more creative and innovative. “We repeatedly find that having more diverse networks and being the bridge that connects groups of people that usually don’t communicate with one another are especially important in helping employees generate novel and useful ideas. In fact, it’s not just your direct ties that impact your creativity but also your second-hand connections,” she said. “They can be as important, if not more.”

In terms of team dynamics, Venkataramani also finds that teams whose members interact with a wide variety of external sources tend to be more creative, but there is a catch: this exposure is useless unless the team is also adept at problem-solving in a decentralized fashion. When creative problem-solving within the team is centralized under a few people, the benefits of collecting diverse external information are squandered away. She said she is also exploring other factors such as how the profile of team members’ knowledge depth (level of detail or complexity) and breadth (full span of knowledge) of experience impacts the team’s creative ability.

Other areas of her recent work look at how managers, while claiming to welcome creative ideas from employees, tend to prematurely reject them. She and her coauthors find in one recent paper that managers who have lower social status (i.e., respect, prestige and admiration from peers) in the organization, are more likely to reject novel ideas from employees because they tend to feel insecure and become territorial about their domains of work. Yet, developing a sense of identification with the overarching organizational goals can help attenuate such tendencies. She said managers at times may also irrationally reject ideas from outside just because “they were not invented here, and we don’t do it this way.”

“Leaders are the critical factor that enables creativity. It's important for leaders [of a] creative team to set the stage, but not perform on it, which is easier said than done,” Venkataramani said. “A leader’s role should be to not create a risk-free environment, but rather a psychologically safe environment that encourages employees to try and fail and help them to get up and continue after failure.”

She said she encourages managers and team leaders to ensure their “space is inclusive of people with different ranks and different backgrounds to come and share their ideas without being penalized.”