Generation Y & Team Creativity: The Strategic Role

of e-HRM Architecture

Barbara Imperatori and Rita Bissola

Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Department of Economics and

Business Administration, Largo Gemelli 1, 20123, Milan, Italy

Abstract. Nowadays HR Departments intend to be a ‘business partner’; this

means sustaining the critical sources of competitive advantages, such as knowl-

edge creation, creativity processes and innovation. In order to attract, retain and

develop the ‘new creative and always connected’ talents of the Y Generation,

to design a new e-HRM architecture is a strategic issue. The present article,

starting from a wide empirical experiment with a sample of 1078 students, pro-

vides valuable results about the relationship between team and individual crea-

tivity and suggests some useful indications for e-HRM, especially for the new

and not yet well known Gen-Yers. Multiple measures of both individual and

team creativity were considered. Data confirm that individual creativity is posi-

tively related with group creativity but it does not fully explain it. Interpersonal

dynamics intervene. This evidence is the base for defining some guidelines

which are useful in the design of strategic e-HR architecture, in supporting the

new Y-Gen staffing, training and development as well as team design and in-

terpersonal dynamics, in order to really enhance organizational creativity and

competitive advantage sustainability.

1 Introduction

It is required that HRM departments become ‘business partners’. This means design-

ing an HR architecture that is able to generate and sustain a company’s strategic value

according to the specific sources of competitive advantage [1], [2].

Among others, innovation through creativity is recognized as a critical source of

strategic success for many modern organizations that compete in fast, global, chang-

ing and continually pioneering industries. From an HR perspective, this means de-

signing an HR architecture that is able to support creative processes and spread them

within the whole structure both by creating favourable organizational conditions and

by sustaining individual creative talents. [3].

Our paper aims to explore the possible strategic role of e-HR systems to sustain

creative processes, specifically considering a new crop of young people in the work

force, the so-called Y Gen. [4], [5], [6]. They are talented, self-starting and, espe-

cially, creative, but also still controversial about their behavioural and cognitive styles

[7].

Imperatori B. and Bissola R. (2009).

Generation Y & Team Creativity: The Strategic Role of e-HRM Architecture .

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Human Resource Information Systems, pages 59-68

DOI: 10.5220/0002175300590068

 SciTePress

Our research sets its sight on the Y Gen creativity processes to analyse how they

behave when involved in creative activities, especially considering their mind-set

about social interactions and their learning styles [5], [6]. Our results are particularly

relevant for the e-HRM perspective, because they prove that the e-HRM approach

could be truly strategic in the sense that it is really joined to the new creative Genera-

tion Y.

2 Theoretical Background and Research Questions

A sustainable competitive advantage implies composite creative activities to cope

with the increasing environmental complexity and to be proactive in the competitive

arena [3], [8]. The new Gen-Yers are described as resourceful and original and well

suited for the creative challenge; they are also the new Virtual Generation, always

connected and with special learning and cognitive styles. These considerations sug-

gest the development of new HRM solutions to help companies manage their creative

Y-Gen young talents for their strategic purposes.

2.1 Individual and Collective Creativity

Creativity is the production of new, useful ideas by an individual or small group of

people working together [9], [10], [11]. In the literature it has been traditionally de-

scribed as an individual characteristic and various previous studies have focused

primarily on personality traits associated with creative behaviours, cognitive factors,

and motivation [12], [13].

Interest in the collective dimension of creativity is more recent, coinciding with

recognition of its strategic value in a business setting [11]. But literature on group

creativity mainly concentrates on contextual or organizational conditions able to en-

hance creativity [10], [3] and little emphasis has been given to organizational design

issues related to effective HRM architecture. Moreover, only few research projects

consider the relationship between individual and collective creativity and they have

some limitations that restrict the comparison of findings and generalization of results

[14], [15]

2.2 Y Gen

According to Generational Theory [16], Y Gen is composed by a birth cohort that

started life between 1982 and 2003 [17]. Wilson & Gerber [7] identified seven distin-

guishing traits of Gen-Yers. They are ‘special’ considering their parents’ care; ‘shel-

tered’ – that is wrapped in cotton wool; ‘confident’ – that is optimistic about their

future prospects; ‘team-oriented’ – that is skilled in collaborative effort; ‘achieving’

particularly about their career, without involvement in idealistic activities; ‘pres-

For a more complete literature review on creativity see also references 17 and 18.

sured’, especially by their workaholic parents and finally; ‘conventional’ that is

strongly attached to parents and family even if born in a divorce culture.

Alsop [6] describes Gen-Yers’ with a strong sense of entitlement. Their work ex-

pect-ations are high pay, flexible work schedules, fast career tracks and work and life

balance. They are multitasking and have a low power distance attitude.

Proserpio and Gioia [5] describe them as the Virtual Generation, familiar with vir-

tual technologies and therefore characterized by a virtual cognitive and learning style,

needing an aligned teaching pedagogy: non linear, focused more on deuteron-

learning, autonomous, interactive, and conceiving learning as fun.

Companies are sincerely interested in how to manage and engage them because

and they are their future mangers and leaders. They seem to be very different from the

previous Generation X, but there are still a lot of grey areas concerning their working

expectations and performance drivers. It is still an enigma how to attract and retain

them and how to design effective organizational systems to manage their develop-

ment paths [6], [18], [19], [20].

2.3 HRM and e-HRM

The rapid development of the Internet during the last years fostered the HR systems

toward the new e-HRM approach [21]. The new technological opportunities are a

bridge that could help the connection between the two parts of the working relation-

ship; for the organizations, e-HRM solutions are a way to support flexibility, knowl-

edge-sharing, and development, while for employees, they are a new approach to

cope with their working preferences and motivations [22].

e-HRM can be designed with three kinds of goals in mind: improving the strategic

orientation, improving efficiency or/and improving client service orientation of tradi-

tional HRM; consequently there are three different types of e-HRM: operational -

concerning the administrative area, relational - concerning the way to manage the

relationship between organization and employers and finally - transformational, to-

ward the alignment between employees and organizational strategy [23].

The academic interest in e-HRM has increased even if the research field is still

new and the results are sometimes controversial and not consolidated into a unique

theoretical framework [24], [25], [26]. Among others, more research is needed to

better address different user-types and attitudes and to propose the strategic processes

toward the e-HRM design and implementation. In fact there is some evidence of dif-

ferent actors’ reactions to e-HRM, comprising, for instance, perception of attractions,

image, but no evidence focuses specifically on particular kinds of users (such as Y-

Gen). Moreover, considering the evidence about strategic intent and the consequences

of e-HRM, at operational level, efficiency is still controversial and not addressed;

relational and trasformational consequences are almost lacking in the research find-

ings and also the strategic approach is not well defined and analyzed [21].

2.4 Research Questions

Creative collectives can produce higher creative results than the mere collection of

individual creativity [3]. This means that creativity can be and has to be organized.

How to design creative teams? What are the relational and organisational conditions

that can promote creative processes, considering the new Y Gen? Which could the

role of e-HRM be to sustain individual and collective creative processes? How to

design effective e-HRM architecture to sustain creative processes within organiza-

tions?

Given the state of the art of the literature on creativity, the description of the Y

Gen, and the aim of this article, we empirically investigate: (a) the relationship be-

tween individual creativity of team members and group creativity: (b) the relationship

among the various components individual and group creativity; (c) the interaction

processes among team members in performing collective creativity tasks.

On the basis of this investigation, which involved 1078 undergraduate students,

we discuss the role of e-HRM architecture in sustaining collective processes among Y

Gen.

3 Research Variables and Methodological Design

Consistently with the literature analysis and in order to test our research questions, we

considered multiple measures of both individual and group creativity. Group creativ-

ity was measured considering the collective output and was operationalized as a mul-

tiple variable according to Besemer and O’Quinn [27]. The three dimensions consid-

ered are: a) novelty, in terms of originality, b) resolution, in terms of how the product

meets the expressed needs, c) elaboration and synthesis, in terms of general design.

Individual creativity was measured by multiple indicators from the psychological

literature (both Williams and Torrance test) [28], [29]. Fluency, flexibility, original-

ity, lateral and associative thinking are some of the considered dimensions.

We designed an experiment to analyse the relationship between individual and

team creativity. 1078 undergraduate students attending courses of Organizational

Design, HRM and Organisational Behaviour at Catholic University in Milan compose

the research sample. They formed 98 eleven people-groups, which were in charge of

performing a creative product. An observer was assigned to each group, to look at the

process together with the two researchers (according to the Critical Incident Tec-

nique). Group creativity was evaluated by a jury of 12 students, two researchers and

two “experts” (an architect and a psychologist). 1190 people were totally involved.

We also checked for some control variables (i.e. gender, age). At the end of the ex-

periment, all the participants (including observers and the researchers) were asked to

edit a semi-structured observation report to narrate their experience [30].

4 Preliminary Results

Overall results suggest some fruitful indications to better support creative processes

through teams of Gen-Yers in high creative projects. The main evidence concerns

team design and HR governance systems.

As mentioned, group creativity was measured according to the Besemer &

O’Quinn scales [19]. To validate the scales, data on the 70 items were first synthe-

sized in the 11 mid-factors all showing significant results of the related factor analysis

models. In table 1 the synthesis factors and the explained variance of each model are

shown.

Table 1. Synthesis factors and the total variance explained.

Items No. Synthesis Factor Total variance explained

9 items ORIGINAL 85,95%

6 items SURPRISING 86,96%

3 items GERMINAL 87,7%

6 items VALUABLE 67,1%

6 items LOGICAL 82,43%

9 items USEFUL 78,15%

8 items ORGANIC 69,54%

5 items ELEGANT 88,01%

5 items COMPLEX 73,33%

6 items UNDERSTANDABLE 72,18%

7 items WELL CRAFTED 86,07%

Using these 11 synthesis dimensions, a further factor analysis model was per-

formed. The new model indicates three factors that correspond to the three elements

of the output creativity: component 1 corresponds to novelty, component 2 to elabora-

tion & synthesis, and component 3 to resolution. The model results (table 2) statisti-

cally demonstrate the significance of the three dimensions proposed by Besemer &

O’Quin, as a consequence of the collected data.

The correlation table points to interesting connections among a number of the

variables considered. First of all, group creativity has proven to be positively corre-

lated with average individual creativity of the group, even though the intensity of the

connection is not particularly high (ρ = 0.268). Looking at the various components,

the most significant correlation is between product novelty and average individual

creativity (ρ = 0.307). The correlation of elaboration & synthesis and resolution with

average individual creativity is positive, but close to zero and not statistically signifi-

cant, considering (ρ < 0.1). As for the control variables, the table shows a negative,

although not significant, correlation between the year of birth of the participants and

total group creativity (ρ = -0.234). The index becomes negatively significant when

looking at the dimension resolution (ρ=-0.248). The index becomes negatively sig-

nificant when looking at the dimension resolution (ρ=-0.248).

The regression analysis shows (see Table 3) a significant positive relationship be-

tween individual creativity and group creativity. Specifically we obtained the follow-

ing results: a) there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between the

average individual creativity of the team and the group creativity, but with a low

predictive power; b) the dimensions of group creativity (i.e. novelty, elaboration &

synthesis and resolution) show different levels of significance: there is a positive and

strong relationship between novelty and individual creativity with a still quite low R

(0,162), and the significance of the regression model of individual creativity to reso-

lution and elaboration is not relevant (t>10%).

Table 2. Factor analysis: rotated component matrix

Componets

Factor Elaboration/Complex .954 .103

Factor Novelty/Original .892 .164 .385

Factor Novelty/Surprising .884 .195 .356

Factor Novelty/Germinal .877 .187 .388

Factor Resolution/Useful .977 .123

Factor Resolution/Logical .180 .828 .480

Factor Elaboration/Organic .242 .701 .623

Factor Resolution/Valuable .517 .600 .540

Factor Elaboration/Elegant .543 .243 .783

Factor Elaboration/Understandable .246 .547 .746

Factor Elaboration/Well crafted

.464 .503 .688

To go deeper, we performed a two-step cluster analysis according to the following

variables: average individual creativity of the group, individual creativity standard

deviation of the group, overall group creativity, resolution, novelty, elaboration and

synthesis. We identified four clusters. Cluster 1 is composed by low-creative people

in a very homogeneous way. Cluster 2 collects medium-creative people (on the aver-

age), but with a high variance within the group. Cluster 3 collects low-creative people

also with a high internal variance. Finally, cluster 4 is composed of very homogene-

ous and high-creative people. Cluster analysis shows that cluster 4 is the best consid-

ering group creativity levels, with the exception of elaboration and synthesis (where

the cluster 3 is the best performer). Cluster 2 is characterized by low creative per-

formance with reference to all the group creative dimensions. Cluster 1 is the worst

one. Surprisingly cluster 3 obtains the best performance for resolution and the sec-

ond-best performances for elaboration & synthesis and novelty, even if it is composed

of low-creative people.

Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser

Normalization. Rotation converged in 5 iterations

Table 3. Regression models synthesis.

Dependent variable Predictors (input) R Square

Global Statistical

significance Model

Statistical sig.

coefficient

Group Creativity Individual Creativity (avarage group) 12.3% sig. F< 5% Individual Creativity (avarage group) 0,2608 sig. t<5%

Individual Creativity (group std dev) Birth year (group average) -0,2265 sig. t<6%

Birth year (group average)

Brain Right

% Female

Factor Novelty Individual Creativity (avarage group) 16.2% sig. F< 1% Individual Creativity (avarage group) 0,3506 sig. t<1%

Individual Creativity (group std dev) % Female -0,2638 sig. t<5%

ear

roup avera

)

Brain Right

% Female

Factor Resolution Individual Creativity (avarage group) 6.2% sig. F< 5% Birth year (group average) -0,2483 sig. t<5%

Individual Creativity (group std dev)

Birth year (group average)

Brain Right

% Female

Factor Elaboration Individual Creativity (avarage group) 5% sig. F= 6.9% Birth year (group average) -0,2236 sig. t= 6.9%

Individual Creativity (group std dev)

Birth year (group average)

Brain Right

% Female

Standardized Coefficients

5 Results Discussion

Our data show that within Y Gen, individual creativity does not fully explain group

creativity. Results also confirm the different relationships among various creativity

components, both at group and at individual level. Specifically, the data demonstrate

that novelty is strongly related to individual creativity, otherwise elaboration & syn-

thesis are less influenced by individual creativity, and resolution is nearly independ-

ent.

Such considerations open up to the next part of our research agenda, which as-

sume that social dynamics probably intervene in collective processes thus contribut-

ing to determine group creativity results. Cluster analysis made it clear that interven-

ing processes have a broadening effect on individual creativity, and proved that join-

ing a group could be advantageous in particular for certain kinds of people. Results

suggest that the most creative and homogeneous groups seem to obtain the main ad-

vantage from the collective interaction, in particular with reference to novelty and

elaboration & synthesis. But, more surprisingly, positive effects also concern groups

characterized by a low average individual creativity and a high level of internal vari-

ance. These groups were the best for resolution and obtained a high score for elabora-

tion and synthesis too.

Finally, with reference to the organizational and interpersonal dynamics, we took

into consideration the semi-structured survey completed by observers and participants

and, in an exploratory way, we identified six categories of intervening processes, that

seems to have an important influence on the overall group creativity. Emerging coor-

dination roles sustain creative group performance, whereas positive affective relation-

ships produce ambiguous effects. They hinder collective creativity within the group

composed of medium creative and homogeneous members (cluster 2), and seem not

to be relevant in high creative homogeneous groups (cluster 4). Managing conflicts,

goal orientation, effective communication are always positively related to creative

collective performance. Emerging rules and time awareness seem to be particularly

relevant for people that obtain a great advantage from collaboration (cluster 3).

6 Y Gen Creativity and e-HRM Implications for Theory and

Practice

The empirical evidence, along with the Y Gen traits described in the sociological and

pedagogical literature, allows us to focus on two main empirical results and to ad-

vance some points for designing e-HRM architectures that strategically support crea-

tivity in Y Gen teams.

The first main result is about the critical role of HRM in sustaining individual and

collective creativity among organizations; not only highly creative people can obtain

high creative results; also medium-creative people can produce a high level of collec-

tive creativity, when some interpersonal dynamics and rules occur. This confirms the

relevance of people management practices in order to manage creative collective

tasks both at individual and collective levels.

The second results, closely related to the previous one, is about the critical role of

e-HRM about creativity; the Y Gen are called the Virtual Generation (V-Gen), in the

sense that they are embedded in the Internet era, they are always connected and they

are PC, console- and web-based gamers, they are completely used to technology [3].

All these factors underline the relevance of aligning people governance tools, using

technology as a facilitator and mediator in the relationship between Gen-Yers and

organizations, also for the HRM systems that have to move toward e-HRM.

According to these two main results, our research enables us to propose some

guidelines for the design of e-HRM, which can support the psychological contract of

the Gen-Yers (e- HRM relational purpose), and also organizational strategic sustain-

ability by enhancing creativity (e-HRM transformational purpose). In particular we

can draw some assumptions with reference to:

e-Attracting for Creativity. e-Recruitment and, in general, technology-based rela-

tionships are especially suited to the new and creative Y Gen style; they widely use

such tools to communicate and interact. Gen-Yers often even prefer technology medi-

tated relationships and, of course, this is also the case of working relations. In that

sense e-recruitment can act as useful tool to attract and recruit the most creative

young talents.

e-Staffing and Design for Creativity (People and Teams). The elevance of both

creative and social competences in collective creative tasks means that an effective

staffing process has to be designed also to assess individual behavioural competences,

not only technical and creative ones. This could also include assessing sessions of the

individual behavioural competences useful to develop collective creative projects

mainly managed through technological tools.

With reference to organizational design supporting creativity, our results highlight

that it is possible to compose a creative team differently. It is possible to obtain a high

degree of overall creativity through a team composed both by high homogeneous

creative members and by less creative members led by a highly creative leader.

Higher levels of resolution are possible in the second team structure, whereas higher

levels of novelty are more probable using the first team structure. This means that the

internal team structure and job design have to be developed according to the individ-

ual creativity level and considering the type of creativity involved in the task.

e-Developing for Creativity. One of the main issues in the creativity literature is the

assumption that creativity can be learned. On the other hand, some studies demon-

strate that Gen Yers have a non linear, deuteron and interactive learning style, which

is different from the learning approach of the previous generations. This has an im-

portant impact on the training systems design. The main evidence is that IS-based

methodologies become critical and a Web-based learning approach and tools to sup-

port social networking, community development and knowledge sharing will be cru-

cial for the employees development.

Finally, and more generally, all the e-HRM architecture has to sustain those inter-

personal and social competences that are critical in the collective creative team activi-

ties. This should be included into the design of evaluations and performance appraisal

systems, compensations structure, career development paths.

These results ask for deeper empirical analysis in the field of declining e-HRM ar-

chitectures for different employees (Gen Y versus other generations, and Gen Y

across different countries, different technological environments and cultures). Fur-

thermore other studies are needed to move toward a new e-HRM approach that is able

to sustain a self-centred development attitude, which is aligned with the Gen Yers’

style.

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