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6444This paper selects everyday organizational activities of a technology-based company as the research object, and uses qualitative research methods, from the perspective of everyday interactions complying with " Renqing” and " Guanxi”, to explore the internal mechanism of Lirang shaping organizational creativity in the context of organizational practice. The study finds that Lirang behaviors that follow the Guanxi rules not only promote the creation of new ideas by expanding the boundaries of organizational knowledge and changing organizational behaviors, but also facilitate the timely recognition of new ideas and the value creation of new ideas in the " Renqing” interactions maintaining Guanxi. Therefore, this study extends the theoretical research of organizational creativity. First, this study points out that the Lirang process can not only promote new ideas’ generation, but also benefit to new ideas’ transformation from the " newness” to the " value” by the organizational members’ spontaneous activities, thus, breaking through the plight that organizational creativity is difficult to effectively implement in practice because of traditional research ignoring the follow-up activities driving by " Renqing”. Second, this study gives the theoretical connotation of organizational creativity relatively complete from the Guanxi rules of Lirang, such as including individual creativity, personal creativity and relational organizational creativity, and supports the theory of organizational creativity generated in interpersonal interaction. Finally, different from the politeness theory paying attention to individual behaviors in traditional theory structures, this study emphasizes the research clue of " Renqing” and " Guanxi” of everyday interactions, and establishes the organizational creativity theory from Lirang behaviors, as a result, this paper provides a new research method for the future exploration of the enterprise management theory of China. This paper also identifies three research directions that are worthy of further investigations: （1） to explore how Lirang behaviors influence the creative process under different cultural backgrounds using the quantitative research method; （2） to explore the universality of Lirang behaviors shaping organizational creativity; （3） to investigate how Lirang behaviors can influence organizational creativity through organizational learning, organizational structures and organizational incentive designs.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
Lirang and Organizational Creativity: An Exploratory Study on the Enterprise’s Everyday Interactions
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 40, Issue 08, pp. 98 - 111 (2018) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.08.008
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Cite this article
Pan Ancheng, Wang Zhiqian. Lirang and Organizational Creativity: An Exploratory Study on the Enterprise’s Everyday Interactions[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2018, 40(8): 98-111.
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