Connecting and Creating: Tertius Iungens, Individual Creativity, and Strategic Decision Processes
To innovate, managers are often advised to make strategic decisions based on changes in their external business environment. Our research suggests that managers should also consider how strategic decision‐making enables the social processes through which employees generate creative ideas essential to organizational innovation. Our results show that employees who bring people in their network and their diverse ideas together (i.e., the tertius iungens [TI] orientation) tend to improve creative performance. However, for those employees is it easier to develop creative ideas when strategic decisions are comprehensive and slow? Paradoxically, when top managers consider a narrower range of options and act more quickly to respond to challenges in the external environment, they risk constraining the social processes that lead to creativity within the organization.
