The creative leadership practices of haute cuisine chefs

Résumé En

The aim of this chapter is to detail directing practices contributing to creative leadership and identify what creative leaders actually do to enhance team creativity and materialize the leader’s creative vision through the organization’s outcomes. This research relies on a practice-based approach, which allows it to enter into the minutiae of organization and work. It emphasizes the doings, the daily interactions between actors, and the relationship between their work and organizational and field level. Mobilizing data collected through authors’ long-standing research projects on creative haute cuisine restaurants, this research inductively builds upon reflexive interpretation to unveil three dynamics of directing practices: enabling, as configuring the creative space configuring the creative space to set the conditions of creative work; orientating, as managing creative work to keep abounded and focused; and complying, as assessing ideas to select those that fit.