Group Processes and Team Creativity

Innovation, and knowledge work in general, is widely conceptualized as an interdependent team activity (Mohrman, Cohen, & Mohrman, 1995; Taggar, 2002), yet creativity is typically conceptualized as an outcome of individuals (Amabile, 1982, George, 2007). The increasing reliance upon teams rather than individual work implies that creativity can also be a team outcome as well as an individual one. The view of innovation as a team activity, with creativity is an important component of the innovation process, provides further motivation in examining creativity as a team outcome.Creativity has been defined as the generation of novel and useful ideas or solutions (Amabile, 1982). Under the existing paradigm of creativity research, despite the definition of two separate theoretical components, creativity has been treated as a unitary construct, althou recently this has been questioned (George, 2007). While individual creativity occurs only when an individual is both novel and useful, research has yet to examine whether these two criteria have different antecedents. Recently a construct measuring the novelty and usefulness criteria separately has been developed (Sue-Chan, Hempel & Kwan, 2008).Pirola-Merlo & Mann (2004) argue that team creativity can be explained as the aggregation of the creativity of the individuals within the team, while Taggar (2002) views team creativity as distinct from aggregated individual creativity. The researchers propose that separating out novelty and usefulness can shed light onto this issue, because it is possible that the novelty and usefulness components might belong to different team roles. Consider the situation where Person A is high in novelty, but low in usefulness, while Person B is low in novelty yet high in usefulness. Neither individual would be individually creative, but the researchers propose that the appropriate team processes can lead to high levels of team creativity in this situation.In this project, the researchers will separately examine the novelty and usefulness aspects of team creativity, by adapting the individual level two-dimensional measure of Sue-Chan et al (2008). The major focus of the project will be to examine characteristics of the team and the team environment which influence the team creativity outcome, with a particular focus upon team processes that promote the ability of the team to combine the diverse contributions of individual members. Examples of such processes the researchers propose to study, based upon their own research into team processes as well as prior research on creativity, include: transactive memory system, conflict management, and convergent/divergent thinking.