Creativity, Organizational Knowledge, and the Power of Dreams

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62% of team’s creative outcomes predicted by leader’s dream habits

This study explores how dreams are liked to creativity in real-world corporate projects. It focuses on the role of dreaming on leadership style of project managers.

What did they do?

This scientific paper looked at 10 projects from two high-tech companies, both large research facilities in Spain. The scientists measured the of the way project managers led, performed, and dreamed.

• The leadership style of each project manager was measured through interviews with them, and with the senior managers of the research facility. The scientists were interested in knowing how the project managers would ideally organize their project members, assuming there were no barriers to do so. Each project manager was assigned a leadership style: hierarchical, group, team, and clan.  

  The hierarchy-like organizational ideal is based on a rigid distribution of tasks amongst the project members, a great deal of centralization of decision-making and an extensive use of formal reporting to the project manager. The clan-like team had the highest level of decentralized decision making, and the one in which a sense of belonging, mutual support, and empathetic behaviour was the rule.

• The creativity of each project was measured by asking the project managers, and their senior managers, to rate the project.

• The dreaming style of each project manager was measured by asking them to rate their dreams for emotional intensity, creativity, and vividness.

What did they find?

The scientists found a link between dream creativity and project creativity (Pearson r = .624, p = .027). That is to say, project managers with emotionally vivid dreams were rated by the senior leaders of their company as producing more creative outcomes.

Looking specifically at leadership styles, the scientists noticed some key differences between the success and dreaming patterns of hierarchy project managers and clan project managers. The clan project mangers were far more likely to report emotionally vivid dreams. Their projects were also rated as 3x as creative as the projects of the hierarchy project managers.

Schiavone, F., Villasalero, M. Creativity, Organizational Knowledge, and the Power of Dreams. J Knowl Econ 4, 279–292 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-013-0159-2