HOW ORGANIZATIONAL CONTROL AND TIME PRESSURE JOINTLY AFFECT DESIGN CREATIVITY: A CONFIGURATION ANALYSIS

Yadi Li; Yan Ning; Ning Sun; Jinfeng She

Abstract:

While organizational control and time pressure are ubiquitous to design services, their co-existence brings about intricate impacts on design creativity. This study thus aims to examine how organizational control and time pressure jointly affect design creativity. It adopted a configurational perspective to investigate the combined effects of multiple control strategies (i.e., outcome, behavior, and clan control strategies) and time pressure on design creativity, taking architectural and engineering (A/E) design as the empirical setting. A questionnaire survey was conducted in Hong Kong, involving 222 design professionals from 193 A/E design firms. The data were analyzed using Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA). The results find two configurations of control strategies and time pressure associated with a high level of creativity. Both emphasize the central role of clan control and the avoidance of behavior control. While C1 indicates the absence of time pressure, C2 embraces the presence of outcome control. There are three configurations inhibiting creativity, which all agree on the absence of clan control yet each has distinct core and periphery conditions. Specifically, C3 highlights the presence of outcome control, whereas behavior control is the core condition and time pressure is the periphery condition in C5. C4 indicates the absence of time pressure and behavior control. This study advances the understanding of configurations of control and time pressure affecting design creativity and offers managerial implications to reconcile them in A/E design firms.