Jun
2021
Positive deviants
‘Positive deviants’: Why rebellious workers spark great ideas
Organisations tend to see rebels as troublemakers – but suppressing these individuals and their ideas could backfire.
There is psychological evidence that rebelliousness is essential for creativity. Harvard psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg spent more than five decades researching individuals who had made ground-breaking contributions to science, literature and the arts, seeking to understand what drove their creativity.
To investigate the benefits of rebelliousness further, a team led by Paraskevas Petrou at the Erasmus University Rotterdam recently surveyed 156 employees from various industries in the Netherlands. They measured rebelliousness via a questionnaire that asked participants to rate their agreement with statements such as:
- I break rules
- I know how to get around the rules
- I use swear words
- I resist authority
If they are committed to creativity, leaders should take practical steps to ensure that progress is achievable, ensuring that the “rebels” have the available space, funding and time to pursue innovative ideas that may appear crazy, unwarranted or out of place at the time, but that could subsequently save the organisation.
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more on disrupt in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=disrupt