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Executive Commentary
Abstract
The article presents a commentary on the need for creativity in business teams. Creativity in this context is defined as the production of novel and useful ideas. Finding useful ways for organizational teams to be more creative is important because speed and agility are critical to business success. The author says there needs to be more focus on how the collaboration process impacts creativity. He contends that effective collaboration can bring substantial divergence of thought into focus. The author believes that brainstorming collaborations between two people tend to diminish the effects of production blocking and downward norming.
... Dyads were chosen for this study as the essential instance of social group (Levine, 2003) exhibiting key collaborative online work processes, like coalition formation, power dynamics, reciprocity, and performance (Williams, 2010;Wang et al., 2013), linked to collaboration formation agency (Fausing et al., 2013;Cordery et al., 2010;Hoegl and Parboteeah, 2006;Langfred, 2000a), which is the focus of this study's framework. Dyads also exhibit a unique one-to-one capability to share and exchange creative ideas with fewer inhibitors of larger groups, such as social loafing, groupthink or production bottlenecks (Brajkovich, 2003;Knights and Murray, 1994). ...
... The reason is that dyads have a unique one-to-one capability to share and exchange ideas. At the same time, the inhibitors that typically occur in larger groups, like social loafing, groupthink, and production bottlenecks, are less likely to occur in these groups (Brajkovich, 2003;Knights and Murray, 1994). Finally, dyad interactions permit observing key group processes like coalition formation, inclusion/exclusion, power balances and imbalances, leadership and followership, cohesiveness, and performance (Williams, 2010), linked with expressions of collaboration agency and autonomy in various collaborative settings (Fausing et al., 2013;Cordery et al., 2010;Hoegl and Parboteeah, 2006;Langfred, 2000a). ...
As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of online collaborations by grouping workers in a top-down fashion and according to a set of predefined decision criteria. This approach often means that workers have little say in the collaboration formation process. Depriving users of control over whom they will work with can stifle creativity and initiative-taking, increase psychological discomfort, and, overall, result in less-than-optimal collaboration results—especially when the task concerned is open-ended, creative, and complex. In this work, we propose an alternative model, called Self-Organizing Pairs (SOPs), which relies on the crowd of online workers themselves to organize into effective work dyads. Supported but not guided by an algorithm, SOPs are a new human-centered computational structure, which enables participants to control, correct, and guide the output of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOPs to two benchmarks that do not allow user agency, and on an iterative task of fictional story writing, reveal that participants in the SOPs condition produce creative outcomes of higher quality, and report higher satisfaction with their collaboration. Finally, we find that similarly to machine learning-based self-organization, human SOPs exhibit emergent collective properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to form more distinct clusters of compatible collaborators.
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