Human beings can ponder the abstract; they can imagine a work of art, think up an invention or dream up the future. This ability to imagine is what sets humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
“Creativity is not just about how it makes businesses more innovative and able to make more money,” said Professor Roy Chua, the Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Human Resources at the Lee Kong Chian School of Business. “It’s also a very distinctive aspect of humanity. Somewhere in our human evolution, we branched out from the animals that cannot see beyond the immediate.”
In his research into creativity, Associate Professor Chua, who is also Associate Dean for Postgraduate Programmes, has made significant discoveries regarding the role that culture and, more recently, gender, plays in spurring or dampening creativity.
One of his more surprising findings relates to a concept called “ambient cultural disharmony” where intercultural conflict, even if it is peripheral to and does not involve an individual directly, could have a negative impact on that person’s creativity.
“Say you have two friends of different cultures, maybe they don’t like each other. This may have an impact on your creativity, just being in your environment, because it causes you to believe that ideas of different cultures are not compatible. This paper was probably more counterintuitive than others I’ve done,” Associate Professor Chua said.
The paper, which was published in the Academy of Management Journal, won the journal’s 2013 Best Paper Award.
Thanks to the prompting of a doctoral student who wanted to collaborate, Associate Professor Chua has also started looking at the gender gap in innovation achievements.
“A lot of the prior work on creativity claimed that men and women are equally creative, but if you look carefully at the innovation achievements of men and women, there is a clear gender gap – women lag men. So that got me interested in exploring this even more,” he said.
His latest research highlights a tendency called novelty avoidance, where he found that women systematically picked less novel ideas among many good ones generated for fear of attracting criticism or backlash for ideas they feared were too far from the norm.
“Women are very cognisant of that, and they hold themselves back more than men,” Associate Professor Chua said of this new finding.
Although his current work lies in the area of human behaviour, his basic degree was actually in computer and information science (he graduated from the National University of Singapore in 1998). He made the switch away from computer science because of a fascination with how people think and behave, and subsequently garnered a Master’s degree in Philosophy and a PhD in Management (Organizational Behaviour) from Columbia University.
“I was interested in human psychology and in business school, organisational behaviour is as close to psychology as you can get. The good thing is that it allows me to understand psychological processes in a business, organisational context.”
As for exploring creativity, this was prompted by Associate Professor Chua’s own artistic streak.
“I have been an amateur artist all my life. I’ve been painting since I was young, doing oil landscapes, impressionism and some abstract painting.
“At some point, I wanted to find out what makes people creative. It’s always been a great mystery to me so I went to graduate school wanting to study creativity,” he said.
While still a doctoral student, he published two noteworthy papers: about how managers develop trust in their professional networks and about the importance of guanxi in China. These helped him to raise his profile and gain recognition as a researcher.
The papers, “From the Head and the Heart: Locating Cognition- and Affect-Based Trust in Managers’ Professional Networks” (2008) and “Guanxi vs Networking: Distinctive Configurations of Affect and Cognition Based Trust in the Networks of Chinese vs American Managers” (2009), were published in the Academy of Management Journal and the Journal of International Business Studies respectively.
His early work on culture feeds into his current interest in creativity.
“If you look at my more recent work, it’s also about culture’s impact on creativity. The biggest realisation is that culture matters a lot, context matters a lot.”
After graduating from Columbia, he spent six years at Harvard Business School as an Assistant Professor of Business Administration. But after 11 years in the United States, and as his research interests turned more towards China and Asia, he felt the lure of home.
“My years in the US helped me realise that many of the research theories there still had a very Western-centric focus,” he said. He saw SMU as a more American-style university from which to do Asian centric research, including that in Chinese organisational behaviour and management practices.
“I thought SMU would be a better fit for me. Being a young university, it allows for more freedom in experimenting with different things. Older institutions have more rules because they are more entrenched in the old ways,” he said.
Associate Professor Chua, who has been with SMU since 2014 and teaches students in the MBA, Executive MBA, PhD and DBA programmes, characterised his teaching style as that of the Socratic method. He does not lecture to students, per se, but instead quizzes them on readings they would have done prior to class.
“I don’t give them the answers. My job is to quiz students throughout class and write on the board. We collectively derive lessons through the back-and-forth, so it’s a very participant-centred kind of learning, a highly interactive pedagogy,” he
said.
While some students can be sceptical at first, they tend to be converted after a few lessons, Associate Professor Chua said.
One former student commented that the professor’s teaching style “challenges students to dig deeper to develop clearer answers”.
Even though the Socratic method requires students to actively participate, which might disadvantage the shy ones, this does not happen. Another student noted that even quieter students participated in Associate Professor Chua’s class as he makes them feel like they are able to speak freely.
Clearly the ability to come up with creative solutions is as important in the classroom as it is in the workplace.
