Creative Success in Teams

Alexander S. McKay,Roni Reiter-Palmon,James C. Kaufman

• Editorial: Academic Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780128203828
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Personality in Psychology

Today's workers spend upwards of 80% of their time collaborating and teams have become the fundamental unit within organizations. Creative Success in Teams summarizes for practitioners and researchers what drives team creativity. Utilizing research from psychology, organizational behavior/management, business, and education, the book discusses how best to start, manage, and foster creativity in team environments, how to encourage participation and collaboration, what makes for the most creative team, and how best to lead and evaluate creative teams.

• Summarizes creativity research from psychology, education, and business
• Identifies how best to form a team for creative output
• Discusses how to foster team participation and collaboration
• Includes multicultural, interdisciplinary, and diverse teams

Chapter 1: Managing the key processes for team innovation

Paul B. Paulus^a; Lauren E. Coursey^b; Jared B. Kenworthy^{a a} Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, United States
^b Department of Psychology, University of North Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, United States

Abstract

Team innovation requires that teams use effective approaches to the innovative processes. This involves problem construction, idea generation and their evaluation, selection, and development. As they are considering a problem for creative efforts, team members need to discuss the various ways they can conceptualize the problem (problem construction). This will facilitate the subsequent collaborative ideation processes. Effective collaborative ideation requires efficient means of exchanging ideas, some degree of task relevant diversity, and a high level of motivation. The evaluation and selection process in teams tend to focus on feasible ideas. We outline some of the procedures that will enhance the probability that the highest quality ideas will become part of the innovation development process.

Keywords

Group creativity; Team innovation; Problem construction; Idea evaluation; Collaborative ideation; Convergent creativity

Acknowledgments

Some of the research reported in this chapter were supported by collaborative grant INSPIRE BCS 1247971 to the first and third authors from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Today, teams are a prominent feature of many, if not most, organizations and much creative work is done in the context of collaborative teams (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014; Reiter-Palmon, 2018). In this chapter, we discuss the challenges of team creativity and offer practical recommendations for promoting effective team innovation. There is an extensive literature on team innovation that has highlighted the importance of a number of factors in enhancing innovation. Among these are psychological safety, supportive leadership, experience as a team, some modest level of intellectual diversity, a high level of communication among team members, and a clear task focus (Hülsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009; Paulus, Dzindolet, & Kohn, 2012; Stollberger, West, & Sacramento, 2019). There is nothing particularly surprising about these findings. One would certainly not expect the opposite relationships. For some other factors such as the role of conflict, demographic diversity, and the effect of time pressure, there remains some degree of uncertainty about the benefits for team creativity (Thayer, Petruzzelli, & McClurg, 2018; van Knippenberg, 2017). The general suggestions from the team literature for enhanced creativity or innovation in teams are as follows: encourage creativity, allow for failure or risk taking, emphasize the importance of communication among team members and with members of other teams, and seek exposure to diverse perspectives. Some degree of time pressure may also motivate more intense efforts (Stollberger et al., 2019).

Interestingly, most reviews of the team innovation literature (e.g., Hülsheger et al., 2009; van Knippenberg, 2017) ignore the parallel literature on group creativity that has focused on and tested the motivational and cognitive processes that are important for creative efforts in groups and teams (see Paulus & Nijstad, 2003, 2019). This is in part because the group creativity literature has a strong focus on the ideation phase of collaborative creativity, whereas the team literature has focused more on the innovation aspect that involves idea selection, development, and implementation, in addition to ideation. However, research on group creativity has also focused on convergent processes such as idea evaluation, selection, modification, and development of innovations. One potential drawback of this research is that most of it has involved the use of ad hoc or laboratory groups for short sessions, whereas team innovation research has typically involved assessments of the performance of real-world teams over longer periods of time. However, many of the team innovation studies rely on the use of survey responses rather than objective measures of team performance (Hülsheger et al., 2009; van Dijk, van Engen, & van Knippenberg, 2012). Judgments of innovation by team members and their supervisors are often the only measures available in organizational settings and presumably reflect reality to some extent. However, there can be significant discrepancies between verbal reports of personal or group creativity and actual performance (Kurtzberg, 2005; Paulus, Dzindolet, Poletes, & Camacho, 1993), and reported effects tend to be weaker for studies using verbal measures than more objective measures (Hülsheger et al., 2009; van Dijk et al., 2012).

Although the group creativity and team innovation fields have had somewhat independent existences, there is significant value in integrating the findings and theoretical models (Paulus & van der Zee, 2004). The group creativity literature has highlighted the role of collective efficacy (Taggar, 2019), diversity (Paulus, van der Zee, & Kenworthy, 2019), newcomers (Levine & Choi, 2019), dissent (Nemeth & O’Conner, 2019), affect (To & Fisher, 2019) social identity (Haslam, Adarves-Yorno, Steffens, & Postmes, 2019), networks (Yuan, 2019), idea selection and evaluation (Rietzschel, Nijstad, & Stroebe, 2019; Stasser & Abele, 2019), electronic communication (Dennis, Minas, & Williams, 2019), and social norms (Goncalo, Katz, & Ellis, 2019). Each of these factors is likely to play important roles in work teams, and each of these foci are derived from theoretical models that are relevant to team contexts. Such an integrative effort is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter (but see Paulus et al., 2012). However, in this chapter, we highlight the implications of the theoretical and empirical work on collaborative ideation for enhancing the creative potential of teams. Team definitions vary and some are quite involved (Salas, Goodwin, & Burke, 2009). To simplify the presentation, we use the term “team” in the rest of the chapter for collectives that work together on a task for a common goal. This includes even ad hoc temporary groups since much teamwork involves periods of short-term interactions.

It is obvious that collaboration can often be beneficial for creativity. Some tasks require the involvement of people with different skill sets or backgrounds. Even if such diversity is not required, sharing ideas or perspectives among team members can stimulate ideas that would otherwise not occur. However, it is difficult to determine how well team members have taken advantage of their diversity or how much they have benefitted from the exchange process without some type of comparison with teams that do not involve interaction but simply independently contribute their ideas. Although such comparisons are typically not feasible in organizational settings, studies of team creativity in controlled settings in laboratories or in companies have allowed for these types of assessments. These studies have not only determined the factors that enhance and hinder creativity in groups but have also assessed the relative benefit of team interaction by comparing the outcomes of interactive teams with those whose members work independently (often called nominal groups or teams; Paulus & Coskun, 2012).

Although the terms creativity and innovation are often used interchangeably, creativity is commonly defined as the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful (Amabile, 1996; Runco, Illies, & Eisenman, 2005) whereas innovation also includes the implementation of ideas (West, 2002). The creative process typically begins with a divergent phase, focusing on the generation of a large number of ideas. Often team members are discouraged from evaluating ideas at this stage (Osborn, 1963). Idea evaluation and selection are reserved for later stages of the creative process, although this may not be necessary (see Harvey & Kou, 2013). The goal of this convergent stage is to select an optimal idea that is both novel and useful. In many cases, teams must implement the ideas that could necessitate mobilizing resources and securing buy-in from those outside the team. Much of the existing research has equated c...

Índice

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contributors
• Author biographies
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Managing the key processes for team innovation
• Chapter 2: Creative success in collaboration: A sociocultural perspective
• Chapter 3: Leading for team creativity: Managing people and processes
• Chapter 4: Fostering creativity in interdisciplinary and intercultural teams: The importance of team building and team management
• Chapter 5: How diversity promotes team creativity: Two bumpy roads to collective inspiration
• Chapter 6: Don’t call it collaboration! Reframing creative success in teams from the perspective of participatory creativity
• Chapter 7: Factors fostering creativity in start-up teams
• Chapter 8: Mixed feelings: How shared and unshared affect impact team creative success
• Chapter 9: Who (and how many) made this? How crediting authorship affects creativity evaluations
• Chapter 10: Collectively creating music—Creativity in rock bands
• Chapter 11: Team creativity as a form of political action: The case of Liberate Tate
• Chapter 12: An interdisciplinary view on team creativity: Toward integration across fields
• Index