Effects of Authorization

What is a «Challenging» Job?

People enjoy being creative and seek challenges within their scope. You naturally seek to thrive in employment work and experience it as a mode of self-expression. As a result, many managerial posts are advertised as «challenging». However, it is in the nature of challenges, that the identical job can seem:

  • simple and straightforward
  • more or less difficult
  • far too complicated and demanding.

The perception of challenge depends on the person. So if you are an applicant, what do you do?Closed You must judge job demands based on the offered salary, knowledge of your own capabilities, and discussions with insiders, past and present.

Once employed, your job is far better performed if you maintain a positive and creative orientation: and management expects that. To enable this, you must bring an attitude of challenge to your job—much of which is authorized by your contract (or compact).

So a key difference for creativity in an organization is that you should seek your challenges within the components of achievement that are explicitly part of your job. (The diagram shows these components.) You cannot count on calling any organization-wide challenge your own, because it will inevitably be subject to specific authorization sooner or later.
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Assignment, Obligation and Positivity

Any freely chosen and personally owned challenge has characteristic features in the upper three Groupings as shown in the diagram.

The challenge requires courage, flows from positivity, demands immersion, and depends on perseverance. These psychosocial states activate and shape the use of creative energies generated and handled within the lower four Groupings.

In an organization, it is not possible to choose and pursue a challenge of any significance without reference to management. So the challenge is formally assigned to and accepted by the employee, or suggested by an employee and then formally authorized by the manager. Either way, management is in charge because the organization «owns» the resources consumed in meeting the challenge, including the employee's time and attention.

The effect is that the employee becomes under an obligation to use willpower and creative energies. Obligation is a form of motivation (within THEE) and it depends heavily on positivity. So positivity does not disappear: it is simply enfolded within the willingness to fully discharge the obligation.

From this perspective, it becomes necessary to modify other higher features of the creativity Framework.


Originally posted: 17-Feb-2012