Jim Berry is a 5th year Ph.D. candidate in Organizational Behavior at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Kenan-Flagler Business School. He received his M.A. from the University of Florida and his B.A. from The College of William and Mary. His research focuses primarily on creativity, decision making, and considerations of how we pursue research. He seeks to understand how new ideas are generated, how they are evaluated, and how they become assimilated within organizations. Before returning to school to pursue a Ph.D., Jim pushed the bounds of creativity: directing R&D teams for a consulting company, founding a software start-up, writing five anti-terrorism textbooks, and building a strategic planning consultancy practice. Working with Adam Grant, Jim has investigated the impact of motivations on creativity, utilizing field surveys and lab experiments. The results from these efforts are published in an article for the Academy of Management Journal and have generated several ongoing related collaborations. Additionally, working with Jeff Edwards in promoting more precise theory building, current practices were examined and recommendations offered in a paper published in Organizational Research Methods. Jim’s work has been accepted and presented at national meetings for the Academy of Management, the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. In addition, Jim serves as a reviewer for the Academy of Management Journal, and was awarded a 2010 and 2011 Outstanding Reviewer Award from the Academy of Management’s Organizational Behavior (OB) Division.
On the teaching front, Jim has over ten years of classroom experience with a variety of subjects and audiences. At Kenan-Flagler, Jim has taught the core undergraduate OB course Leading and Managing and co-taught a section of the Executive MBA program’s Negotiations course. He is currently slated to teach several sections MBA Negotiations in the spring of 2012. Always looking for new innovative teaching techniques Jim applied for and won a slot in the UNC Future Faculty Program in 2009 and has since been invited back to speak to new program classes the past two years.
Dissertation
Title: “Do we have creative differences? How we construe creativity influences the salience of novelty and usefulness”
Committee: David Hofmann (chair), Jeffrey Edwards, Alison Fragale, Teresa Amabile (Harvard Business School), Adam Grant (Wharton)
Creativity is an organizational necessity for competing in a global economy. Organizational scholars have traditionally defined creativity as the production of ideas or products that are both novel and useful. It is often assumed that the components of novelty and usefulness are equal factors in determining the creativity of an idea or product. However, in some settings, managers and employees appear to prioritize novelty over usefulness, and in other settings, the opposite is true. Applying a decision making framework to how individuals evaluate creative ideas, I look to test how the way people define creativity through their evaluation of proposed ideas, may be influenced by the framing of the problem to be addressed. Drawing on construal level theory, I propose that increased psychological distance will increase the salience of novelty and decrease the salience of usefulness in making judgments of the ideas overall creativity. In testing this hypothesis across both field and lab studies, my dissertation advances knowledge about how contextual factors create barriers to understanding creativity and offers practical steps for enhancing creative processes and output within organizations.