How to Kill Creativity - By Teresa M. Amabile

The pursuit of control, productivity and efficiency in a corporate environment can kill productivity. Creativity has three parts: expertise, the ability to think flexibly, and motivation. Extrinsic motivators are not very effective in encouraging creativity. Employees with strong intrinsic motivation can create immediate results rather inexpensively.
Creative thinking refers to the capacity of how people approach problems and solutions and their ability to put existing ideas together in new combinations. Business creativity requires an idea to be appropriate, original, useful and actionable. Managerial practices that encourage creativity include: challenge, freedom, reasonable resources allocation, mutually supportive work-group features, supervisory encouragement, and organizational support. Excessive infighting and politics kills creativity.