A Social Composition View of Team Creativity: The Role of Member Nationality-Heterogeneous Ties Outside of the Team (original) (raw)

A Model and Exploratory Field Study on Team Creativity

2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2012

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to solve problems creatively or design new products and services. Research to date has mostly focused on individual creativity, rather than team creativity. This paper introduces the Team Creativity Model (TCM) to understand the antecedents of team creativity. TCM posits that both individual creativity and shared mental models (SMMs) contribute to team creativity. SMMs act as a mediator between knowledge sharing and team creativity. Antecedents to individual creativity include an individual's propensity to be creative and individual knowledge. Individual knowledge also is an antecedent to knowledge sharing, as are an individual's propensity to share knowledge and trust within the team. In an exploratory study at a telecom company, a team of design experts participating in four creative sessions provided initial support for the TCM constructs and their relationships. The findings suggest that further exploratory and empirical research on TCM is justified. Some tentative implications for research and practice are presented.

Triggering creativity in teams: An exploratory investigation

Creativity and Innovation Management, 2002

M ost companies are dependent on de-velopment driven by creative ideas, designs, solutions, products and services. Survival and success of organizations, espe-cially in a long-term perspective, depend on creativity and the management of creativity (Ekvall, ...

Enhancing group creativity: the search for synergy

Research on Managing Groups and Teams, 2009

Psychologists have created highly specific and elaborate models of the creative process and the variables affecting creative performance. Unfortunately, much of this research has tended to take either an overanalytical or an underanalytical approach. By overanalytical we mean that researchers have studied single, isolated stages of group creativity, such as idea generation. By underanalytical we mean that researchers have tended to treat ''creative group performance'' as a single, unitary construct. However, we argue that it would be better to approach creativity as a multidimensional sequence of behaviors. In support of this argument, we discuss research on individual as well as group creativity showing that, firstly, there are multiple routes toward creative performance (e.g., flexibility and persistence), which may be pursued 1 alone or in combination. It is likely that these different routes are subject to distinct influences. Secondly, we argue and show that different stages of the creative process (problem finding, idea generation, idea selection, idea implementation) are not necessarily affected by the same variables, or in the same way. We highlight some new questions for research, and discuss implications for the management of groups and teams.

Creativity and cognitive processes: Multi-level linkages between individual and team cognition

Research in Multi Level Issues, 2007

In Press: Innovation: A multi-level perspective. Elsevier research conducted at the individual level on factors that influence the effective application of that process. When available, team level and group research extending the application of the process at the team and group level will also be reviewed, and if not, hypotheses about the effect and nature of the aggregation of the individual cognitive efforts will be offered. Finally, because of the limited research available at the team or group level, and the extensiveness of the research at the individual level, the focus of the propositions in this paper will be that of the team and group.

The Team Creativity Model: An Exploratory Case Study

Journal of the Midwest Association for Information Systems, 2017

Organizations increasingly rely on technology-supported teams to solve problems creatively or design new products and services. To support such efforts, an extensive body of research on creativity has been developed. However, most research to date focuses on individual creativity, rather than on team creativity. This paper introduces the Team Creativity Model (TCM) to understand the antecedents of team creativity. TCM posits that both individual creativity and shared mental models (SSMs) contribute to team creativity. SMMs act as a mediator between knowledge sharing and team creativity. Antecedents to individual creativity include an individual's propensity to be creative and individual knowledge. Individual knowledge also is an antecedent to knowledge sharing, as are an individual's propensity to share knowledge and trust within the team. In an exploratory study at a telecom company, a team of design experts participating in four creative sessions provided initial support for the TCM constructs and their relationships. The findings suggest that further exploratory and empirical research on TCM is justified. Implications for research and practice are presented.

Creativity and Knowledge Sharing in Teams

Journal of Management and Financial Sciences

Despite the wealth of studies related to team creativity, there is a general concern that the field still offers fuzzy indications about how team creativity (TC) can be supported within organizations. Creativity is enacted in the individual, within teams and within networks. Team creativity depends on creative individuals, processes, situations, the culture and the interaction of these factors. A growing number of organizations rely heavily on team creativity to enhance their capacity for generating new ideas. To enable knowledge sharing in teams in order to offer creativity within such a team, members must have access to an arena in which to engage in interpersonal dialogues to share their experiences, suggestions and knowledge with one another. Therefore, the objective of the study is firstly to find out what is understood by creativity of the team in terms of a process and outcome and secondly, to place the knowledge sharing process within the field of team creativity. A literatu...

Is Group Creativity ReallyAn Oxymoron? Some Thoughts on Bridging the Cohesion–Creativity Divide

Research on Managing Groups and Teams, 2009

Psychologists have created highly specific and elaborate models of the creative process and the variables affecting creative performance. Unfortunately, much of this research has tended to take either an overanalytical or an underanalytical approach. By overanalytical we mean that researchers have studied single, isolated stages of group creativity, such as idea generation. By underanalytical we mean that researchers have tended to treat ''creative group performance'' as a single, unitary construct. However, we argue that it would be better to approach creativity as a multidimensional sequence of behaviors. In support of this argument, we discuss research on individual as well as group creativity showing that, firstly, there are multiple routes toward creative performance (e.g., flexibility and persistence), which may be pursued 1 alone or in combination. It is likely that these different routes are subject to distinct influences. Secondly, we argue and show that different stages of the creative process (problem finding, idea generation, idea selection, idea implementation) are not necessarily affected by the same variables, or in the same way. We highlight some new questions for research, and discuss implications for the management of groups and teams.

The relationship between individual creativity and team creativity: aggregating across people and time

Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2004

This paper investigates how the creativity of individual team members is related to team creativity, and the influence of climate for creativity in the workplace on individual and team creativity. A multilevel theoretical model is proposed, and the authors report a study which tests the model using a sample of 54 research and development teams. The results showed that team creativity scores could be explained statistically by aggregation processes across both people and time. Team creativity at a particular point in time could be explained as either the average or a weighted average of team member creativity; the creativity of project outcomes was explained by either the maximum of or average of team creativity across time-points. According to the model, failure to account for aggregation across time as well as across individuals can result in misleading empirical results, and can result in the erroneous conclusion that team climate influences team creativity directly rather than indirectly via individuals.

Creativity in Groups

Psychologists have created highly specific and elaborate models of the creative process and the variables affecting creative performance. Unfortunately, much of this research has tended to take either an overanalytical or an underanalytical approach. By overanalytical we mean that researchers have studied single, isolated stages of group creativity, such as idea generation. By underanalytical we mean that researchers have tended to treat ''creative group performance'' as a single, unitary construct. However, we argue that it would be better to approach creativity as a multidimensional sequence of behaviors. In support of this argument, we discuss research on individual as well as group creativity showing that, firstly, there are multiple routes toward creative performance (e.g., flexibility and persistence), which may be pursued 1 alone or in combination. It is likely that these different routes are subject to distinct influences. Secondly, we argue and show that different stages of the creative process (problem finding, idea generation, idea selection, idea implementation) are not necessarily affected by the same variables, or in the same way. We highlight some new questions for research, and discuss implications for the management of groups and teams.