(Re)-Encountering Everyday Creative Work: Experimented Awe as a Process to Foster Innovation in Organizations

Awe is an ambiguous emotion that has previously been addressed as a factor that may contribute to creativity, and whose introduction into organizations can be valuable. Yet, the form of awe that has been proposed to date has restricted the value of creativity to that of a passively experienced phenomenon, or in other words, a force that the individual is subject to. The assumption that creativity may be uniquely and passively fostered by an external force may have detrimental effects in organizations. Indeed, this conceptualization endorses the view that individuals are subject to their environment rather than being action generators, as is valued by organizations. However, the conceptualization of an active and experimentation-based form of awe may reverse this view and complement the relationship between awe and creativity in organizations. The theory set out in this paper is multi-layered. At its surface, we propose a phenomenon based on meaningful problem construction and experimentation which may intrinsically motivate individuals to be more actively creative in organizations. This phenomenon is termed “Experimented Awe”. In more depth, the theory proposes four conditions that may allow the promotion of this phenomenon in organizations, and three challenges that organizations may encounter. Based on the Deleuzian philosophy, we propose that what seemed to have been accepted as a single form of awe in relation to creativity seems, in fact, to be a phenomenon manifesting via two different, complex, and complementary paths contributing to organizational creativity. Experimented Awe contributes to novel forms of Ilinx-based play (vertigo) which can encourage employees to take more time to construct meaningful problems, experiment, and accept failure related to the creative process.