Investigating architecture firms’ creativity: An organizational design perspective

Since the last decades, the most important architecture firms started to count hundreds of employees, having to structure themselves as effective companies. Learn how to manage the interaction between different skills is key to remain competitive in the market. This work thus grounds on the idea that architecture firms’ organization design and the fruitful intersection of their internal heterogeneous skills can result in innovative design methodologies that significantly affect the quality of their projects and their competitiveness. Accordingly, this work investigates the impact of organization design and employees’ skills on architectural creativity. To do so, it presents the preliminary results of a pilot study conducted among four Italian architecture firms. T-tests and Analysis of Variance demonstrate that organization design and employees’ knowledge might play a critical role in supporting these firms’ creativity. The work concludes with relevant implications for practitioners and Universities as well as with directions for future research.