A systematic literature review of organizational culture, creativity, and innovation: a bibliometric and theory development, context, characteristics, and methodology framework analysis

Abstract

In the last three decades, organizational culture, creativity, innovation, and their relation have taken the interest of scholars; a growing body of knowledge is gathering around organizational creativity and innovation performance. The purpose of this paper is to present the main findings from a systematic review of 140 papers directly related to organizational culture, creativity, and innovation performance, conducted through a bibliometric approach using VOSviewer. Additionally, a theory–context–characteristics–methodology approach was used to identify potential research gaps and suggest future research in these areas. This work highlights the scope for future directions, which could be very important to deepen further the research work by offering multidisciplinary research, combined research methodology and eventually raising the need to explore new theories arising from the further understanding of the mentioned fields. A comprehensive literature search was performed from reputable databases and publishers, such as Emerald Group Publishing, Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, JSTOR, Springer Publishing, Wiley, Sage Publishing, Scopus, Web of Science, EBSCO Information Services, covering a time span of 40 years (from year 1983 to 2023). The keywords organizational culture, organizational creativity, innovation performance, the synonyms, and their combinations using or/and were adopted. An extensive list of articles was generated from this process. Only articles with more than 100 citations were retained for further consideration, implied as a qualitative criterion. To ensure the relevance of the selected literature, the titles and abstracts of the identified articles were initially reviewed manually. Articles that lacked essential data or were unrelated to the primary research focus were excluded. Based on these criteria, 167 articles were selected. Following a full-text review, a final set of 140 articles was included for detailed analysis. Bibliometric analysis was used to define the time span evolution of research, co-occurrence of keywords, top authors contributing in these fields, industries involved in these studies and typology of research performed. Using the theory–context–characteristics–methodology framework, the authors examined the literature across dimensions of theory, context, characteristics, and methodology to propose future research avenues on organizational culture and its influence on innovation, mediated by creativity. The findings based on the theory–context–characteristics–methodology framework provide a focused review of existing research on the antecedents, mediating mechanisms, and moderating factors of innovation. Organizational culture as independent variable appears to influence productivity and innovation, innovativeness, innovation and performance, product innovation, creativity and innovation, innovation and innovative culture. There is a good potential for theoretical and methodological extension since the research area covers three important concepts: 1) organizational culture; 2) innovation; and 3) creativity. This research contributes to management discipline by providing theoretical, contextual, and methodological insights into the disciplines of organizational culture, creativity, and innovation by using theory–context–characteristics–methodology framework. No prior studies in these areas have utilized theory–context–characteristics–methodology; existing publications primarily feature bibliometric analyses. Moreover, research on organizational culture, creativity, and innovation in the Western Balkans is still limited, pointing to a clear need for further studies. Expanding research in these areas will provide valuable insights into regional challenges and opportunities and add to the existing literature.