Search

How should leaders make ethical decisions about the production and dissemination of creative products, when creative work adds to the normal leadership workload the complications of ill-defined tasks, uncertain solution paths, professionals who tend toward autonomy and exploration, and diversities of expertise that must collaborate? Ethics addresses the outcomes of decisions—typically the outcomes of decisions vis-a-vis others (Trevino, Brown, & Hartman, 2003). Creativity, the production of new ideas, and innovation, the translation of these ideas into viable new products and services (Mumford & Gustafson, 1988), are complex performances (Mumford, 2012) that can affect not only those involved in their production, but the organization and society more broadly.

Why and how do people intentionally choose to add variation and diversity to society and culture, rather than mimic others’ successes or otherwise support the status quo? These creative acts, and the ideas, products, or procedures they spawn, also create a problem space—or what I believe should be a problem space—at the intersection of creativity and ethics. Most of the scholars in this volume start from the perspective of creativity and examine how morality plays into creative endeavors. In this chapter, I provide the alternative starting point of moral reasoning and moral development and examine what effect creativity may have on ethics. How does injecting creativity—novel and useful ideas or products that can transform the cultures into which they are launched (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; see also Moran, 2010d)—affect notions of what people consider to be good?