Project Details
Projekt
Secrecy as Organizing Uncertainty in Creative Processes
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Jana Costas, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Accounting and Finance
Term
from 2016 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 248556105
In this project we explore the role of organizational secrecy, the intentional concealment of information from actors by actors in organizations, for organizing uncertainty in creative processes. Empirical insights suggest that organizational secrecy is a popular way of dealing with different kinds of uncertainty among highly innovative organizations: top-secret research labs, orchestrated secrecy-based marketing campaigns, and the prevention of information leakage through secrecy to name but a few examples. However, this empirical prevalence of secrecy as a key organizing principle in creative processes runs counter to current management research, which largely tends to stress the importance of knowledge- and information-sharing for fostering creativity, thus framing secrecy as a problem for creativity. In contrast, this project seeks to advance organizational research by empirically studying actual practices of organizational secrecy as an organizing mechanism for creative processes that is per se neither good nor bad for creativity. Based on an in-depth, comparative case study of a music label and a technological pharmaceutical company, we seek to advance extant research in three important and interrelated ways. First, we want to explore what different modes of (formal and informal) secrecy are employed for the management of different kinds of uncertainty in the two industries (i.e. demand-side uncertainty, uncertain innovations, or risks of information leakage). Second, by studying the actual everyday secrecy-based practices through participant observations at the two companies, we want to advance current knowledge about secrecy not only as a way to reduce uncertainty (i.e. the prevention of information leakage), but also as way to induce uncertainty (i.e. by creating isolated zones of creativity that can surprise the organization) in creative processes. Finally, based on the insights of the empirical study, we want to develop an integrative conceptual framework explaining how and why different modes of organizational secrecy that feed into different uncertainty-inducing and -reducing practices can lead to different organizational outcomes (i.e. fostering and/or dampening creativity). Thus, we aim to contribute to a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of secrecy as a mechanism for organizing uncertainty in creative processes that goes beyond current allegations that secrecy matters by explicating exactly how, why and when it matters.
DFG Programme
Research Units
