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Team Creativity, Cognition, and Cognitive Style Diversity
Abstract
In spite of the recognized importance of team creativity for organizational success, the factors that influence it are not well understood. In this paper, we address an important gap in the literature on the impact of team diversity on team creativity. We show how team cognitive diversity both enhances and inhibits team cognition, or the manner in which information is organized and distributed within the team. We further demonstrate that team cognition is a key mechanism through which cognitive diversity influences team creativity. The paper introduces a new theoretical lens, the signal-detection perspective, which argues that cognitive diversity amplifies the signals to the location of critical cognitive resources within the team and aids in their detection, consequently enhancing the form of team cognition that is central to team creativity. We test the predictions in a longitudinal study with 112 MBA student project teams. This research advances our understanding of what makes teams creative by synthesizing and testing existing theory as well as providing a new perspective that highlights an alternative way in which a team’s cognitive inputs impact team creativity.
This paper was accepted by Sendil Ethiraj, organizations.
... Abankwa (2019) demonstrated the significance of team adaptability for the success of complex projects. Aggarwal and Woolleyb (2019) found that cognitive diversity affects the team's creative capacity, and the study by Drury-Grogan (2021) correlated communication and collective interaction (CI). Although several studies like the ones mentioned above were found, no study was found that explain how distributed cognition (DC) can improve the collaborative problem-solving (CPS) of project teams within the context of projects. ...
... The research conducted by Poirier et al. (2017) demonstrates that the cognitive factors of an individual, such as requirements, expectations, intentions, incentives and talents, contribute to the achievement of collaborative behaviour (CB). Aggarwal and Woolleyb (2019) discuss that the cognitive diversity of team-members (TMs) influences the collective cognition by influencing how information is organised and distributed within the team and, consequently, the collective delivery capacity for creativity. ...
... Poirier et al. (2017) reinforce that cognitive factor, such as requirements, expectations, intentions, incentives and talents, play a role in the achievement of CB. Recent evidence indicates that the cognitive diversity of TMs influences the collective cognition by influencing how information is organised and distributed within the team and, consequently, the collective delivery capacity for creativity (Aggarwal and Woolleyb, 2019). To achieve a team structure focused on reasoning and problem-solving, it will be necessary to invest in adaptable, communicative and conflict-management-capable teams (Detzen et al., 2018;Smulders et al., 2008). ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to verify how distributed cognition enhances collaborative problem-solving in the context of projects.
Design/methodology/approach
Using qualitative research and in-depth interviews, a sample of 32 project managers with experience in traditional and agile methods acting in Brazil and internationally participated in the research process. The analysis process, utilising coding techniques, involved stages: open, axial, coding and selective coding. These stages encompassed the evaluation of categories based on a hierarchy, in order to determine an appropriate level of abstraction that properly explains theoretical findings.
Findings
The results indicate that distributed team cognition is significant for collaborative problem-solving. The data from the interviews allowed the proposal of a model of cognition, and the identification of the elements that support it.
Practical implications
Understand how aspects of distributed team cognition can impact the behaviours of the project professional and contribute to problem-solving in the project environment.
Originality/value
The elements observed affects the collaborative problem-solving by presenting a model of distributed cognition, which is composed by directed communication, collective interaction, trust building and collaborative behaviour.
... The analysis of top-down factors has focused on the interaction among the members of a group, analyzing several aspects such as team creativity, group heterogeneity, individual incentives, consensus-seeking, duration and continuity of the interaction, and the successive order of turns taken by the group's members (De Vincenzo et al., 2017;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2018;Bernstein et al., 2018;Dai et al., 2020). This line of research tends to focus on situations with small groups (between 2 and 5 individuals), which makes it difficult to study how collective intelligence behaves according to group size, particularly in the case of large groups. ...
... The social learning strategies that emerge during the process become the key factors in the achievement of agreement within the group, and they lead to a higher quality solution than individual ones. Further behaviors appear, such as the herd effect: i.e., an initial tendency to conformity that limits the group's creativity, or a wide dispersion of alternatives that need to be unified and coordinated (Mao et al., 2016;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2018;Toyokawa et al., 2019). Further difficulties are the decrease in creativity because group members copy one another (Lorenz et al., 2011), and the excessive influence of leaders (Iyengard et al., 2011;Mann and Helbing, 2017;Fontanari, 2018). ...
... Further difficulties are the decrease in creativity because group members copy one another (Lorenz et al., 2011), and the excessive influence of leaders (Iyengard et al., 2011;Mann and Helbing, 2017;Fontanari, 2018). To take advantage of a collective effort to tackle problems through the process of exchanging ideas, crossfertilization requires the presence of a system that exercises the role of "facilitator, " i.e., of control and management of the group's collective work (Mann and Helbing, 2017;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2018;Gimpel et al., 2020). ...
The emergence of collective intelligence has been studied in much greater detail in small groups than in larger ones. Nevertheless, in groups of several hundreds or thousands of members, it is well-known that the social environment exerts a considerable influence on individual behavior. A few recent papers have dealt with some aspects of large group situations, but have not provided an in-depth analysis of the role of interactions among the members of a group in the creation of ideas, as well as the group’s overall performance. In this study, we report an experiment where a large set of individuals, i.e., 789 high-school students, cooperated online in real time to solve two different examinations on a specifically designed platform (Thinkhub). Our goal of this paper 6 to describe the specific mechanisms of idea creation we were able to observe and to measure the group’s performance as a whole. When we deal with communication networks featuring a large number of interacting entities, it seems natural to model the set as a complex system by resorting to the tools of statistical mechanics. Our experiment shows how an interaction in small groups that increase in size over several phases, leading to a final phase where the students are confronted with the most popular answers of the previous phases, is capable of producing high-quality answers to all examination questions, whereby the last phase plays a crucial role. Our experiment likewise shows that a group’s performance in such a task progresses in a linear manner in parallel with the size of the group. Finally, we show that the controlled interaction and dynamics foreseen in the system can reduce the spread of “fake news” within the group.
... Nevertheless, research on surface-level characteristics claims that even when the characteristics are not expected to influence the execution of a task, they may generate different expectations regarding it (Phillips & Loyd, 2006). In this sense, diversity of knowledge and values is not provided solely by unobservable characteristics (Cronin & Weingart, 2013), such as differences in expertise, cognition, and perspectives (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019). Accordingly, when it comes to similar salient characteristics (or, one could argue for perceived similarity), the opposite takes place, and individuals expect similarities in attitudes and beliefs as well, which generates more significant perceived attraction between individuals Phillips & Loyd, 2006). ...
... It happens once diverse information generates the necessity of information integration, which requires team members to be fluent in each other domains, which is often a challenge (Cronin & Weingart, 2013). Thus, even though diversity can promote better outcomes, such as creativity (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019), it does not happen smoothly, as there are more difficulties in communication and possibly the understanding of each other within the team. ...
... Therefore, we find indications that the variety of information and knowledge provided by the existence of deep-level diversity within a team may have a cost related to the amount of effort individuals spend to perform their tasks. Due to differences in expertise, cognition, and perspectives (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019), diversity may negatively impact communication and cohesion within a team. Despite our proposition that the same effect would occur in the perception of surface-level diversity, considering the greater awareness of different information , there was no indication of such a relationship in our results. ...
Despite many advances in diversity research, how individuals perceive effort when working within a diverse team is still unclear. The literature emphasizes that diversity brings more knowledge, information, and new perspectives to the table; however, it might take more from team members to work with all this novelty than working in a high similarity context. Based on the understanding that external factors affect the perception of mental effort and not only the requirements of the tasks, we propose that the perception of diversity increases the perception of mental effort. As it is crucial to assess diversity through the eyes of individuals, this work uses the perceptions of team members to understand the results of diversity on their effort. Finally, diversity beliefs are proposed as moderators for the described relationship. A positive attitude towards diversity may attenuate the perception of effort, and the opposite, when there is a preference for similarity. We conducted the empirical setting of the paper through an online survey responded by 143 participants from Brazil. Abstract Despite many advances in diversity research, how individuals perceive effort when working within a diverse team is still unclear. The literature emphasizes that diversity brings more knowledge, information, and new perspectives to the table; however, it might take more from team members to work with all this novelty than working in a high similarity context. Based on the understanding that external factors affect the perception of mental effort and not only the requirements of the tasks, we propose that the perception of diversity increases the perception of mental effort. As it is crucial to assess diversity through the eyes of individuals, this work uses the perceptions of team members to understand the results of diversity on their effort. Finally, diversity beliefs are proposed as moderators for the described relationship. A positive attitude towards diversity may attenuate the perception of effort, and the opposite, when there is a preference for similarity. We conducted the empirical setting of the paper through an online survey responded by 143 participants from Brazil.
... To date, studies of transactive memory systems in temporary teams have almost exclusively relied on laboratory settings (e.g., Hollingshead, 2001;Moreland & Myaskovsky, 2000) or student projects (e.g., Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Lee, Bachrach, & Lewis, 2014;Lewis, 2004). Unlike temporary teams in field settings-typically formed by bringing together unfamiliar people to quickly work on highly interdependent and complex tasks (Bechky, 2006)these studies asked the students to perform either routine or otherwise synthetic tasks common to educational settings that generally fail to reflect the realities of teamwork in practice (Aguinis & Bradley, 2014;Morgan & Stewart, 2019). ...
... Unlike most temporary teams that operate outside of laboratory experiments, these teams were asked primarily to perform routine tasks (Ren & Argote, 2011). The other approaches that used temporary teams to study transactive memory systems involved students working on semester-long projects (e.g., Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Lee et al., 2014;Lewis, 2004). These teams, however, were given ample time to develop a transactive memory system and were asked to perform synthetic tasks. ...
... First, through task specialization, a transactive memory system frees up team members' cognitive resources because they do not have to expend mental effort on tasks being done by others. This allows the team to collectively devote more cognitive resources to novel idea generation and problem-solving (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Gino et al., 2010). For example, freeing up cognitive resources has been shown to improve creativity and the implementation of novel and valuable ideas at work (Ohly, Sonnentag, & Pluntke, 2006). ...
The transactive memory system has been studied extensively, yet we still know little about how it influences the effectiveness of temporary teams. Additionally, little is known about the boundary conditions of the well-established benefits of transactive memory systems on team performance. Our primary goal in this study is to build and test a theory that investigates the influence of a transactive memory system on the performance of temporary teams while accounting for conditional effects of both task and relationship conflict. On the surface, a transactive memory systems perspective may seem incompatible with temporary teams. Transactive memory systems typically require time or team member familiarity to develop. However, team members on temporary teams often are selected because of their expertise, not team member familiarity, and often must quickly and effectively operate under time and outcome pressures. We present a theory that suggests transactive memory systems should have a meaningful influence on temporary teams, and its effect is accentuated in the presence of task conflict and attenuated in the presence of relationship conflict. We test our theory using a sample of 202 teams participating in the Global Game Jam, the world's largest hackathon devoted to designing and developing games within a 48-h period. In addition to implications for literatures on transactive memory systems and temporary teams, our study adds to a growing literature providing practical advice and insight regarding hackathons, a pervasive source of innovation and idea generation.
... Developing a Shared Vision is complicated insofar as individuals are diverse in how they make sense of their environment (Wang and Rafiq, 2009). This is known as cognitive diversity: deep-level differences and beliefs, which influence how reality is perceived and interpreted (Chen et al., 2019;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019). Cognitive diversity within a group enriches the innovation process through the presence of multiple perspectives (Zouaghi et al., 2020;Shin et al., 2012;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019;Mitchell and Boyle, 2021). ...
... This is known as cognitive diversity: deep-level differences and beliefs, which influence how reality is perceived and interpreted (Chen et al., 2019;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019). Cognitive diversity within a group enriches the innovation process through the presence of multiple perspectives (Zouaghi et al., 2020;Shin et al., 2012;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019;Mitchell and Boyle, 2021). Yet, diversity also generates conflict among contrasting perspectives, making groups unproductive and hampering implementation (Andriopoulos et al., 2018;Chen et al., 2019). ...
... Despite this, there is a surprising lack of studies investigating how individual visions are related. While most innovation studies focus on action and outcome, a need for studies investigating individual cognition in groupwork is emerging (Perry-Smith and Mannucci, 2017;Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019). Cognitive Network Science may provide answers (Siew et al., 2019). ...
Purpose
Having a shared vision is crucial for innovation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of individual propensity to collaborate and innovate on the development of a shared vision.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors build a network in which each node represents the vision of one individual and link the network structure to individual propensity of collaboration and innovativeness. During organizational workshops in four multinational organizations, the authors collected individual visions in the form of images as well as text describing the approach to innovation from 85 employees.
Findings
The study maps individual visions for innovation as a cognitive network. The authors find that individual propensity to innovate or collaborate is related to different network centrality. Innovators, individuals who see innovation as an opportunity to change and grow, are located at the center of the cognitive network. Collaborators, who see innovation as an opportunity to collaborate, have a higher closeness centrality inside a cluster.
Research limitations/implications
This paper analyses visions as a network linking recent research in psychology with the managerial longing for a more thorough investigation of group cognition. The study contributes to literature on shared vision creation, suggesting the role which innovators and collaborators can occupy in the process.
Originality/value
This paper proposes how an approach based on a cognitive network can inform innovation management. The findings suggest that visions of innovators summarize the visions of a group, helping the development of an overall shared vision. Collaborators on the other hand are representative of specific clusters and can help developing radical visions.
... The concept of style is of general interest and has been studied in various contexts, including business, politics, economics, sociology, and finance (e.g., Bertrand & Schoar, 2003;Chan et al., 2018;Malmendier et al., 2021;Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019). Style has also a particular relevance in the arts, where it captures patterns of artistic production that are distinctive of an artist, place, or period. ...
... However, in recent years, style has become increasingly relevant in several other contexts. Business scholarship includes studies of leadership style (Rotemberg and Saloner, 1993;Bertrand and Schoar, 2003), style in product design (Chan et al., 2018), and cognitive style in teams (Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019). The communication style may denote voting outcomes of Federal Reserve committee members (Malmendier et al., 2021) and constitutes a particular feature of populism (De Vreese et al., 2018). ...
Creative workers strive to achieve success and influence by producing original output. In this paper we define and measure originality and influence, based on a new model of style. We apply the methodology to Western classical music composed since the 15th century, and test it using extensive data on the content of musical compositions, popular success, and biographical information. We find that more original composers tend to be more influential upon the work of their later peers and more successful with present-day audiences. A positive association between originality and influence also holds across works by a given composer.
... Scholars have called for more research on deep-level variables to explore the match between leaders and followers (Foti et al., 2017;Gooty & Yammarino, 2016;Shih & Nguyen, 2022). Cognitive style is a relatively stable variable that influences individual behavior (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Liu et al., 2020;Mello & Rentsch, 2015). Examining the effect of leader-follower cognitive style congruence on subordinates' OCBs contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the antecedent variables of OCBs (Liu et al., 2020). ...
... Traditionally, the cognitive style has been viewed as a unidimensional construct, with analytical and intuitive styles located at opposing poles of a continuum (Allinson & Hayes, 1996). In an organizational context, individuals with an analytic cognitive style prioritize mental reasoning, detailed judgment, and problem deconstruction (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Allinson et al., 2001;Kozhevnikov et al., 2014). They favor structured, task-oriented work environments and value personal benefits (Moos, 1987;Sagiv et al., 2014). ...
This study examined the impact of cognitive style congruence between leaders and followers on followers' organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) by integrating the similarity-attraction and signaling theories. We collected dyadic data from 80 leaders and 223 followers in ten manufacturing companies in China. Using polynomial regression analysis and response surface modeling, the study supported the positive influence of cognitive style congruence on followers' OCBs. Specifically, we found that dyads with more intuitive than analytical leader-follower cognitive styles had higher levels of OCBs. However, there were no significant differences in followers' OCBs between dyads consisting of an intuitive leader and an analytic follower versus those consisting of an analytic leader and an intuitive follower under conditions of cognitive style incongruence. Additionally, the study found that interpersonal trust mediated the relationship between leader-follower cognitive style congruence and followers' OCBs, offering valuable insights for promoting OCBs in the workplace.
... Problem-solving researchers view diverse expertise in teams as a contributing factor to creativity, under the hypothesis that integrating knowledge, skills, and experience from different domains and perspectives increases the quality and creativity of problem-solving (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Chen, Liu, Zhang, & Kwan, 2019;De Dreu & West, 2001;Menold & Jablokow, 2019;Miron-Spektor, Erez, & Naveh, 2011;Shin, Kim, Lee, & Bian, 2012). However, team diversity has also raised significant challenges in communication and team cohesion (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2013;Ancona & Caldwell, 1992;Lovelace, Shapiro, & Weingart, 2001;Srikanth, Harvey, & Peterson, 2016). ...
... Reiter-Palmon and Leone (2018) argued that owing to their domains of expertise, multidisciplinary team members think critically and analyze ideas from a variety of perspectives, thus providing a more precise evaluation of concepts, leading to better choices of solutions. Aggarwal and Woolley (2019) reported that cognitive diversity enhances team creativity by facilitating the detection of mental resources. De Dreu and West (2001) suggested that multidisciplinary knowledge is more likely to integrate the team members' conflicting points of view through sharing information and task-relevant knowledge, helping to avoid fixation, thus enhancing creativity. ...
... From an organizational perspective, there still exists a need for a theoretical framework for combining individual and organizational perspectives (Aleem et al., 2022). Heterogeneous individuals perform differently in remote and office work (Irawanto et al., 2021;Prodanova & Kocarev, 2021), which makes the control and management of teams challenging (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2018). The literature suggests that the impact of remote working on team performance may be related to the availability of technology (Müller et al., 2022), executive support (Chatterjee et al., 2022;Kwon & Jeon, 2018), and organizational culture (Henke et al., 2022;Peters et al., 2016). ...
Organizations have widely begun to adopt remote working since the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the effect of remote work on team performance remains unknown. A multi-layer interaction system based on organizational systems theory was designed to assess how remote working affects team performance. Individual performance was computed using a positively skewed stochastic performance model and a modified NK model was used to simulate the team performance under specialized and collaborative conditions. The results showed a complex relationship between task complexity and remote rate and that collaborative teams require a higher remote rate when the probability of employees benefiting from remote work is low to avoid potential detriments from excessive competition. Further results considering agent heterogeneity suggest that individual-level gains are magnified or reduced at the team level and that assessing individual heterogeneity and task complexity is significant for designing remote strategies. In addition, differential mechanisms in team structure and the hierarchy of authority are discussed. This study presents the design and application of a novel business system that helps teams make optimal remote decisions in addition to responding to conflicting discussions in the literature and in practice and providing new insights into decision-making systems in a digital context.
... More broadly, our study illustrates the importance of context when studying perceived SMMs and their consequences. This further contributes to the team cognition literature and augments past findings on different forms of shared cognition, such as transactive memory systems (Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019) or information processing (Nijstad and De Dreu, 2012), that showed in different applications of interdependence as a mechanism by which shared cognition can be better motivated and leveraged. ...
Purpose
An underlying assumption in the shared mental model (SMM) literature is that SMMs improve whilst team members work together for longer. However, whether dyad members indeed have higher perceived SMMs with higher shared tenure has not been explored. This study aims to, therefore, firstly, investigate this idea, and we do so by focusing on perceived SMMs at the dyadic level. Secondly, because in today’s fast-paced world perceived SMMs often need to be built quickly for dyads to perform, we assess if goal interdependence can reduce the dyadic tenure required for higher perceived SMM similarity. Thirdly, we analyse if these processes are related to dyadic performance.
Design/methodology/approach
We collected a dual-source sample of 88 leader–member dyads across various industries. We conducted PROCESS analyses to test their first-stage moderated mediation model.
Findings
Results showed that dyadic tenure was positively related to perceived SMM similarity, and that goal interdependence moderated this relationship. Additionally, perceived SMM similarity mediated the relationship between dyadic tenure and dyadic performance. Lastly, the overall moderated mediation model was supported.
Originality/value
We contribute to the perceived SMM literature by: investigating perceived SMMs in dyads, testing a key idea regarding the influence of dyadic tenure on perceived SMMs and investigating how goal interdependence may prompt perceived SMM similarity earlier in dyadic tenure and, ultimately, improve dyadic performance.
... (1) A core element of effective transactive memory in collectives is the development of humans' shared understanding of members' expertise. For this reason, extant work demonstrates that team composition, particularly as it impacts attributes such as cognitive diversity, is beneficial for the development of TMS (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Todorova, 2020). However, teams are not always composed with sufficient diversity; groups and teams in many settings tend to be fairly homogenous unless effort is made to maintain diversity, as the tendency toward homophily leads members to self-select into groups that are similar to them and out of groups that are more diverse (McPherson et al., 2001). ...
The internet has enabled an increasing amount of collaboration to occur via virtual teamwork, including more complex forms where individuals are working on multiple teams simultaneously. We argue that the environmental complexity teams face requires they be designed for collective intelligence, a capability enabling groups to accomplish goals across a wide range of environments. We describe the transactive systems model of collective intelligence, which articulates how individual memory, attention, and reasoning give rise to the emergence and mutual adaptation of the transactive memory, attention, and reasoning processes underlying collective intelligence. Furthermore, as artificial intelligence develops more capabilities to facilitate human interaction, we see how it might augment human cognition in ways that will enhance collective intelligence. Developing trust in AI will be essential for enabling higher levels of collective intelligence with tremendous benefits for organizations and society.
... This study allows respondents with different cognitive styles to engage in a creative process with their exploration and development through hands-on experiential learning. There are significant disparities in creativity performance between different cognitive styles that also conform to studies [47,48]. These confirm that the serialist cognitive style is suitable for this research's creative practice activities. ...
In today’s digital age, where smartphones are ubiquitous among the younger generation, they can add to the cognitive load on the brain, even when not in use. This can affect students’ learning outcomes and creativity, leading to negative emotions or creativity blocks during the learning process. Thus, this study investigates the relationship between differences in students’ cognitive styles and their learning motivation, learning outcomes, creativity, and learning satisfaction. The primary objective is to use the STEAM-6E instructional model in virtual reality (VR) courses to understand how students with different cognitive styles can be stimulated to unleash their diverse and vibrant creativity based on their learning preferences during hands-on experiences. The study also aims to explore whether there are disparities in their learning motivation and learning outcomes, and whether there are differences in their overall learning satisfaction. The findings of the study indicate that for the two cognitive styles of holistic and sequential, the subjects showed significant differences in their learning motivation regarding intrinsic goals, extrinsic goals, task value, control beliefs, self-efficacy, and test anxiety. Significant differences were also observed in their learning preferences, learning outcomes, and creative performance. However, the two groups had no significant differences in the effectiveness, efficiency, and overall satisfaction of the learning activities.
... Indeed, the lessons we've drawn here are consistent with the widespread finding in the empirical literature on diversity and teams that diversity is often beneficial in some respects and detrimental in others, and the particular friction we've incorporated into our model-miscommunication-can arguably help explain some of these results. For example: that cognitive diversity is good for divergent creativity (associated with generating ideas), but can inhibit convergent creativity (associated with the ability to build upon and integrate ideas) [53][54][55]; that linguistic and ethnic diversity have a positive effect on groups when individuals have to collaborate on preventative tasks, individual contributions are hard to disentangle, and external threats are easily identifiable, but can have a negative (and more significant) impact when these conditions don't obtain [56]; or that diverse teams identify and utilize more task relevant information in ways that improve team performance, but often as a result of experiencing more conflict that has a detrimental impact on perceived performance and the desire to continue working together [16,57]. ...
This paper contributes to the literature on how diversity impacts groups by exploring how communication mediates the ability of diverse individuals to work together. To do so we incorporate a communication channel into a representative model of problem-solving by teams of diverse agents that provides the foundations for one of the most widely cited analytical results in the literature on diversity and team performance: the "Diversity Trumps Ability Theorem". We extend the model to account for the fact that communication between agents is a necessary feature of team problem-solving, and we introduce the possibility that this communication occurs with error, and that this error might sometimes be correlated with how different agents are from one another. Accounting for communication does not give us reason to reject the claim associated with the theorem, that functionally diverse teams tend to outperform more homogeneous teams (even when the homogeneous teams are comprised of individuals with more task relevant expertise). However, incorporating communication into our model clarifies the role that four factors play in moderating the extent to which teams capture the benefits of functional diversity: i) the complexity of the problem, ii) the number of available approaches to solving the problem, iii) the ways of encoding or conceptualizing a problem, and iv) institutional characteristics, such as how teams work together. Specifically, we find that whether (and to what extent) teams capture the benefits of functional diversity depends on how these four factors interact with one another. Particularly important is the role institutional dynamics (like search methods) play in moderating or amplifying interpersonal frictions (like miscommunication), and notably we find that institutions that work in one setting can be counterproductive in other settings.
... Moreover, we demonstrate how abduction is a collective process, typically occurring across teams of scientists and inventors rather than within them. The most surprising successes occur not through interdisciplinary careers or multi-disciplinary teams 53,54 , but expeditions of scientists from one disciplinary context traveling to another. This implies that abduction is routinely social, where scientists from distant fields achieve substantial impact in advancing on a topic or challenge by bringing them into conversation with alien insights and perspectives. ...
We investigate the degree to which impact in science and technology is associated with surprising breakthroughs, and how those breakthroughs arise. Identifying breakthroughs across science and technology requires models that distinguish surprising from expected advances at scale. Drawing on tens of millions of research papers and patents across the life sciences, physical sciences and patented inventions, and using a hypergraph model that predicts realized combinations of research contents (article keywords) and contexts (cited journals), here we show that surprise in terms of unexpected combinations of contents and contexts predicts outsized impact (within the top 10% of citations). These surprising advances emerge across, rather than within researchers or teams—most commonly when scientists from one field publish problem-solving results to an audience from a distant field. Our approach characterizes the frontier of science and technology as a complex hypergraph drawn from high-dimensional embeddings of research contents and contexts, and offers a measure of path-breaking surprise in science and technology.
... Similarly, team cognitive diversity involves differences between members in the manner and amount of information they process, and enables the production of unique and innovative ideas by those working together (Shin & Zhou, 2007;Showkat & Misra, 2021). It potentially enhances and inhibits the overall creativity of teams (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019). Since team sensemaking encourages consideration and debate of diverse, distinct and non-redundant knowledge generated through cognitively diverse members, it represents an important intermediary to transferring cognitive diversity benefits to team creativity (Van Knippenberg, De Dreu & Homan, 2004). ...
This study examines the role of team sensemaking as an intermediary factor for the link of social environmental factors with team creativity. The findings of the study suggest that cognitive diversity and team autonomy have a positive relationship with team sensemaking and team sensemaking has a positive impact on team creativity. Further, autonomy and cognitive diversity are indirectly related to team creativity through team sensemaking. The results suggest that managers in knowledge-intensive industries should promote cognitive diversity and autonomy to develop team sensemaking, which in turn may stimulate creativity.
... The creative process underlying the elaboration and active processing of information, knowledge and cues linked to ill-defined problems (Mumford et al., 1994) involves processing modalities-that is, creative logics (Gilhooly, 2016;Runco, 2014;Runco & Chand, 1995). Creative logics are thinking modalities that individuals adopt to go beyond the information provided and manipulate knowledge (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Runco, 2014). The creative thinking literature has suggested three main creative logics associated with the manipulation of information or knowledge (Abdulla et al., 2020;Runco, 2014;Runco & Chand, 1995): analogical reasoning (Holyoak et al., 1984), associative thinking (Mednick, 1962) and abductive reasoning (Peirce, 1934). ...
Problem framing is pivotal to fostering knowledge and innovation, especially in the modern environment where problems are often ill defined. However, the managerial literature has thus far mainly addressed problem framing from an outcome perspective, overlooking the processes that lead to the outcomes. A common view is that the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty of ill‐defined problems call for a creative process. Therefore, through ethnographically observing six design thinking workshops, this study adopts a qualitative approach to explore the problem framing creative process. Specifically, we unpack three thinking modalities involved in the creative process (i.e. creative logics) of problem framing: analogical reasoning, associative thinking and abductive reasoning. We suggest that individuals enact these through seven creative operations. In addition, we link these creative operations to two types of problem framing outcomes: referenced frames and crafted frames. From a practitioner perspective, this study casts new light on the importance of problem framing for creativity and innovation, highlighting the ways in which individuals operationalize the creative logics to frame ill‐defined problems as original problems worth solving.
... An important corollary of the central claim of this paper stems from the finding that cognitive diversity and alignment may be important predictors of group performance in joint problem solving. In particular, interactive processes of abstraction can depend on variability in how problems are mentally represented and the corresponding dialogical contributions [14][15][16][17][18][19]. This observation is in line with evidence from group interactions more broadly, suggesting that the composition of members in a group, particularly in terms of diversity of their members, often plays a critical role [20]. ...
The human capacity for abstraction is remarkable. We effortlessly form abstract representations from varied experiences, generalizing and flexibly transferring experiences and knowledge between contexts, which can facilitate reasoning, problem solving and learning across many domains. The cognitive process of abstraction, however, is often portrayed and investigated as an individual process. This paper addresses how cognitive processes of abstraction—together with other aspects of human reasoning and problem solving—are fundamentally shaped and modulated by online social interaction. Starting from a general distinction between convergent thinking, divergent thinking and processes of abstraction, we address how social interaction shapes information processing differently depending on cognitive demands, social coordination and task ecologies. In particular, we suggest that processes of abstraction are facilitated by the interactive sharing and integration of varied individual experiences. To this end, we also discuss how the dynamics of group interactions vary as a function of group composition; that is, in terms of the similarity and diversity between the group members. We conclude by outlining the role of cognitive diversity in interactive processes and consider the importance of group diversity in processes of abstraction.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’.
... Task-related dimensions of variation (e.g., divisibility, complexity, solution demonstrability, and solution multiplicity) would be extracted from these taxonomies and used to label tasks that have appeared in experimental studies of group performance. Similarly, prior work has variously suggested that group performance depends on the composition of the group with respect to individual-level traits as captured by, say, average skill (Bell, 2007;Devine & Philips, 2001;LePine, 2003;Stewart, 2006), skill diversity (Hong & Page, 2004;Page, 2008), gender diversity (Schneid et al., 2015), social perceptiveness (Engel et al., 2014;Kim et al., 2017;Woolley et al., 2010), and cognitive-style diversity (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2018;Ellemers & Rink, 2016), all of which could be represented as dimensions of the design space. Finally, group-process variables might include group size (Mao et al., 2016), properties of the communication network (Almaatouq et al., 2022;Becker et al., 2017;Mason & Watts, 2012), and the ability of groups to reorganize themselves (Almaatouq et al., 2020). ...
The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment's specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.
... Task-related dimensions of variation (e.g., divisibility, complexity, solution demonstrability, and solution multiplicity) would be extracted from these taxonomies and used to label tasks that have appeared in experimental studies of group performance. Similarly, prior work has variously suggested that group performance depends on the composition of the group with respect to individual-level traits as captured by, say, average skill (Bell, 2007;Devine & Philips, 2001;LePine, 2003;Stewart, 2006), skill diversity (Hong & Page, 2004;Page, 2008), gender diversity (Schneid et al., 2015), social perceptiveness (Engel et al., 2014;Kim et al., 2017;Woolley et al., 2010), and cognitive-style diversity (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2018;Ellemers & Rink, 2016), all of which could be represented as dimensions of the design space. Finally, group-process variables might include group size (Mao et al., 2016), properties of the communication network (Almaatouq et al., 2022;Becker et al., 2017;Mason & Watts, 2012), and the ability of groups to reorganize themselves (Almaatouq et al., 2020). ...
The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment’s specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. The researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm—and with far greater efficiency.
... We used two indexes: team creative solution and team daily ideation. Team creative solution was rated by two top executives from the headquarter (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2018;Aime et al., 2013;Hoever et al., 2018). These executives were familiar with each team's work history (e.g., whether an idea was proposed for the first time), but we purposefully did not tell them each team's experimental condition. ...
COVID-19 has prompted diverse responses from governments and created an extreme context for organizations to operate. In this context, company leaders face fluctuated macrolevel policies, endure physical separation from their members, and must rely on virtual communication to conduct teamwork. Yet little is known about what and how leader communication can be effective in inducing team creativity to survive the extreme context. Building on the affective events theory and the literature on media richness, we develop a theoretical model explicating how leaders’ rich (as opposed to lean) virtual communication can mitigate the negative impact of stringent government responses to COVID-19 on work team creativity via a sequential mediation process: first by inhibiting team anxiety and then by facilitating team information elaboration. Data from a three-stage eight-day longitudinal field experiment, in combination with an experience sampling method with 251 employees, on a chain preschool in eight Chinese cities, provide strong support for the hypothesized model.
... O foco nos fatores antecedentes está relacionado à diversidade cognitiva (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Bodla et al., 2018;Kim & Song, 2021;Men et al., 2019), ao humor e ao conhecimento compartilhado (Chen & Liu, 2020;Chow, 2018;Guo et al., 2020). O vínculo positivo desses fatores é testado e validado em relação ao desempenho positivo da criatividade (Bodla et al., 2018;Chow, 2018;Guo et al., 2020;Kim & Song, 2021;Men et al., 2019). ...
Plural creativity is a growing interest in the management field of research. Academic
production, however, remain dispersed, without consolidation and understanding of this
perspective. This article aims to review, integrate, and consolidate academic production on
plural creativity in management. The research is based on a systematic review of national
and international academic production in the field of management. The analysis of academic
production generated four categories: group creativity, team creativity, collective creativity,
and collaborative creativity. The analysis of the categories revealed two central approaches:
creativity as a result and creativity as a process. Our results contribute to the consolidation
of an integrated understanding of plural creativity.
... Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock pointed that having groupthink was to make sure that firms fail, and that diversity of mind lies at the foundation of good management, leadership and stewardship (Fink, 2018). As a matter of fact, recent research points to the significant positive contributions of cognitively diverse teams regarding a wide range of tasks, such as problem-solving (Reynolds and Lewis, 2017), creativity and innovation (Aggarwal and Williams Woolley, 2019). Therefore, if both team/individual-and process/culturelevel are synchronized, active investors are more likely to develop and maintain a competitive advantage over their peers. ...
Purpose
Behavioral solutions to our cognitive biases have long been studied in the literature. However, there is still ample evidence of behavioral biases in decision-making, with only limited improvement in the medium/long term even when debiasing methods are applied. The purpose of this paper is to describe how financial investors could benefit from a proactive management of emotions combined with a set of learning and decision-making heuristics to make more efficient investments in the long run.
Design/methodology/approach
First, the authors offer a classification of the appropriate quantitative and qualitative methodologies to use in different ecological environments. Then, the authors offer a list of detailed heuristics to be implemented as behavioral principles intended to induce more long-lasting changes than the original rules offered by the adaptive toolbox literature. Finally, the authors provide guidelines on how to embed artificial intelligence and cognitive diversity within the investment decision architecture.
Findings
Improvements in decision skills involve changes that rarely succeed through a single event but through a succession of steps that must be habitualized. This paper argues that implementing a more conscious set of personal and group principles is necessary for long-lasting changes and provides guidelines on how to minimize systematic errors with adaptive heuristics. To maximize their positive effects, the principles outlined in this paper should be embedded in an architecture that fosters cognitively diverse teams. Moreover, when using artificial intelligence, the authors advise to maximize the interpretability/accuracy ratio in building decision support systems.
Originality/value
The paper proposes a theoretical reflection on the field of behavioral research and decision-making in finance, where the chief goal is to offer practical advices to investors. The literature on debiasing cognitive biases is limited to the detection and correction of immediate effects. The authors go beyond the traditional three building blocks developed by the behavioral finance literature (search rules, stopping rules and decision rules) and aim at helping investors who are interested in finding long-term solutions to their cognitive biases.
... When the 'sharedness' of individuals' mental models is low, the different task interpretations cannot be effectively integrated (Aggarwal & Woolley, 2019;Cronin & Weingart, 2007). Moreover, delving deeper into the design thinking literature highlights that most studies focus on a process or practice-oriented perspective (Carlgren et al., 2016;Johansson-Sköldberg et al., 2013;Micheli et al., 2019) rather that the individual dimension, such as managers and designers' view of adopting this methodology (Magistretti, Ardito, & Messeni Petruzzelli, 2021). ...
Numerous studies highlight that design thinking is being elevated to the strategic level, on the one hand, propelling designers to the top hierarchical level of the organization, on the other hand, making non‐design functions part of design‐based processes. The increasing adoption of design thinking has transformed how firms implement the related processes and techniques, opening areas of research on how managers differently perceive the relevance of design thinking in achieving innovation goals. In considering the individual dimension as our unit of analysis (i.e. managers), our study relies on the microfoundations theoretical lens to delve deeper into the individual design thinking perceptions of leaders/managers/employees. To do so, we conducted a survey of 197 Italian managers to investigate their different perceptions of the potential of design thinking in achieving innovation goals. The findings show that managers associate a new set of goals with design thinking against the paradigmatic view of a user‐centred practice to generate creative solutions. Indeed, market innovation, organizational change and strategic direction are recognized as goals achievable with design thinking. Moreover, as individuals, managers characterized by (i) different organizational functions, (ii) distinct organizational hierarchy and (iii) diverse organizational experiences differently perceive design thinking in terms of its pertinence to achieving specific innovation goals. By deepening the individual microfoundations dimension, this article contributes to the growing design thinking literature.
... In contrast, some studies have found a negative effect of knowledge diversity on team creativity (Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019;Pollok et al., 2021). Different perspectives may turn into personal conflict that triggers negative emotional reactions (Maitlis and Ozcelik, 2004). ...
While team creativity scholars agree that expertise diversity among team members influences team creativity, there are inconclusive results on whether the effect is positive or negative. To benefit from diversity, team members must share their unique knowledge and build on peers’ divergent knowledge. In this study, we sought to improve scholarly understanding of why and how team members can fail to share their unique knowledge and pay attention to the unique knowledge of colleagues. To do so, we conducted a longitudinal real-life study of a newly formed team tasked with creative problem-solving. We have found that interactions between team members during creative task execution resulted in the emergent perception of expertise asymmetry – some members were perceived as experts (we call these members experts), while others were perceived as non-experts (we call them non-experts). Our study shows that the emerging perception of expertise asymmetry resulted in unproductive behaviors among experts and non-experts. We identified six types of unproductive behaviors and showed how these behaviors (a) limited the team access to cognition of all team members and (b) triggered frustration that, in turn, further fueled unproductive behaviors. We contribute to team creativity literature by improving our understanding of why and how team members can fail to share their unique knowledge and incorporate the unique expertise of their colleagues.
... Research has demonstrated that emergence stems from recombinations of more than two preexisting elements, noting the challenges and values of connecting seemingly unrelated dots in fields [4,5,[20][21][22][23]. Research has also shown structural, conditional, and demographic factors that promote such emergence, including (but not limited to) brokerage positions in networks [24], constant inflows and outflows of members in knowledge communities [25], creators' long-term time horizons that facilitate explorative search [11], and cognitive diversity in creators' teams [26]. ...
This study proposes the notion of “root concepts” in cultural production, defined as a novel style and mode that a creator expresses at the initial field development phase, and that has a great influence on subsequent creators. We explore the role of root concepts in cultural evolution by focusing on their capacity to generate new combinations with other elements and examine how creators use root concepts jointly with other elements. Using data on artists and albums in the rap genre from the online database Allmusic, we view music moods as a type of experience that music generates and focus on music moods as a phenotype in studying styles and modes. We constructed a dataset of recombinatory patterns in the subsequent cultural production and identified two types of root concepts: implosive concepts, which artists use jointly with similar elements; and explosive concepts, which artists use in conjunction with highly diversified elements. Implosive concepts are exclusive because they require creators to have network contagions with those familiar with the root concepts and have strong and specific socio-economic identities. Previous research has suggested that finding a new combination is challenging owing to creators’ limited cognitive capacities and the resulting local search. Our finding presents an alternative explanation: some root concepts (i.e., implosive ones) possess innate characteristics that limit creators from experimentally integrating diversified elements. This study develops new opportunities for future research on the evolutionary growth of cultural production and knowledge fields.
... Ancona and Caldwell, 1992, Boone and Hendriks, 2009, Cummings, 2004, and skills (see e.g. Aggarwal and Woolley, 2019, Swaab et al., 2014, Tan and Netessine, 2019. The results of existing studies are inconclusive: while some of them suggest that the effect of diversity on team performance is positive, others provide evidence for negative, insignificant, and nonlinear effects. ...
Collective creativity and innovation are key determinants of various important outcomes ranging from competitiveness of an organization to GDP growth of a country. As a result, this topic has attracted widespread scholarly interest from different disciplines, including strategic management, entrepreneurship, production and operations management, information systems, marketing, organizational behavior, sociology, economics, and psychology. However, this research remained isolated within disciplinary boundaries, which presents a major barrier for knowledge accumulation and cross-disciplinary learning. In this review, building on a new taxonomy of collectivity, we develop an integrative framework that organizes and synthesizes the fragmented research on the topic. The framework shows how antecedents related to the cognitive, social, and organizational architecture of a collective impact innovation depending on the collectivity type: attention-based, divergence-based, and convergence-based collectives. As a whole, our framework builds an integrative understanding of drivers of collective creativity and innovation and sets the stage for further theory development by facilitating communication across different disciplines. We conclude our review with an agenda for future research.
Cognitive differences can catalyze social learning through the process of one-to-one social influence. Yet the learning benefits of exposure to the ideas of cognitively dissimilar others often fail to materialize. Why do cognitive differences produce learning from interpersonal influence in some contexts but not in others? To answer this question, we distinguish between cognition that is expressed—one’s public stance on an issue and the way in which supporting arguments are framed—and cognition that is latent—the semantic associations that underpin these expressions. We theorize that, when latent cognition is obscured, one is more likely to be influenced to change one’s mind on an issue when exposed to the opposing ideas of cognitively dissimilar, rather than similar, others. When latent cognition is instead observable, a subtle similarity-attraction response tends to counteract the potency of cognitive differences—even when social identity cues and other categorical distinctions are inaccessible. To evaluate these ideas, we introduce a novel experimental paradigm in which participants (a) respond to a polarizing scenario; (b) view an opposing argument by another whose latent cognition is either similar to or different from their own and is either observable or obscured; and (c) have an opportunity to respond again to the scenario. A preregistered study (n = 1,000) finds support for our theory. A supplemental study (n = 200) suggests that the social influence of latent cognitive differences operates through the mechanism of argument novelty. We discuss implications of these findings for research on social influence, collective intelligence, and cognitive diversity in groups.
This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, organizations.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.00895 .
Objective – The purpose of this paper is to present a model of distributed cognition based on project management literature.
Methodology – Utilising the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases, a qualitative and exploratory-descriptive approach was used to conduct a systematic literature review of 138 scientific articles on cognition in projects.
Originality/relevance – This study presents how the field of project management has
approached the cognition issues and how cognition can be applied collectively in project teams.
Results – The findings of the synthesis of study results point to four categories (with sixteen subcategories) relate to cognition in project management, and they are as follows: distributed team cognition; cognitive style of leadership; stakeholder relationship and tension; and learning, as well as is presented a cognition model based on the categories and subcategories found.
Contribution – Understand how aspects of cognition can impact the behaviours of the project professional and contribute to problem-solving in the project environment.
Keywords: Project Management. Distributed Team Cognition. Cognitive Style of Leadership. Stakeholder Relationship and Tension. Learning.
As organizations gravitate to group‐based structures, the problem of improving performance through judicious selection of group members has preoccupied scientists and managers alike. However, which individual attributes best predict group performance remains poorly understood. Here, we describe a preregistered experiment in which we simultaneously manipulated four widely studied attributes of group compositions: skill level, skill diversity, social perceptiveness, and cognitive style diversity. We find that while the average skill level of group members, skill diversity, and social perceptiveness are significant predictors of group performance, skill level dominates all other factors combined. Additionally, we explore the relationship between patterns of collaborative behavior and performance outcomes and find that any potential gains in solution quality from additional communication between the group members are outweighed by the overhead time cost, leading to lower overall efficiency. However, groups exhibiting more “turn‐taking” behavior are considerably faster and thus more efficient. Finally, contrary to our expectation, we find that group compositional factors (i.e., skill level and social perceptiveness) are not associated with the amount of communication between group members nor turn‐taking dynamics.
Past studies have revealed that relationship conflict has negative effects on individual performance. To avoid the losses caused by such conflicts, individuals often choose to avoid interacting with coworkers instead of confronting the issues. However, our present study sheds light on the dark side of this avoidance strategy: it may diminish an individual's creativity. Our study aimed to examine the appropriate response for knowledge employees when faced with relationship conflict. The results indicate that relationship conflict triggers a sequential response, which significantly hampers the creativity of knowledge employees. Specifically, coworker ostracism and knowledge hoarding play serial mediating roles in the impact of relationship conflict on the creativity of knowledge employees. Furthermore, the level of emotional intelligence determines the ability of knowledge employees to effectively manage the negative consequences of relationship conflict. The results provide theoretical and practical insights that help to better explain the impact of relationship conflict on creativity.
Socio-cognitive theory conceptualizes individual contributors as both enactors of cognitive processes and targets of a social context's determinative influences. The present research investigates how contributors' metacognition or self-beliefs, combine with others' views of themselves to inform collective team states related to learning about other agents (i.e., transactive memory systems) and forming social attachments with other agents (i.e., collective team identification), both important teamwork states that have implications for team collective intelligence. We test the predictions in a longitudinal study with 78 teams. Additionally, we provide interview data from industry experts in human-artificial intelligence teams. Our findings contribute to an emerging socio-cognitive architecture for COllective HUman-MAchine INtelligence (i.e., COHUMAIN) by articulating its underpinnings in individual and collective cognition and metacognition. Our resulting model has implications for the critical inputs necessary to design and enable a higher level of integration of human and machine teammates.
This article guides the development of creative insights in supply chain management. The authors begin by describing analogies' role in advancing organization theory with a focus on image transfers between knowledge domains. While much has been said about the merits of conceptual transfers between domains, much equally remains unknown, particularly about how to deliberately develop creative insights that have the potential to challenge or enhance existing supply chain management theory. To address this issue, this research builds on prior work on analogies, creativity, and design thinking to develop a heuristic‐analytic model. This model is designed to assist researchers in theorizing by analogy through a controlled dual cognitive process of divergence before convergence combined with a distant boundary‐spanning knowledge search. An illustration of the model shows how creative output can provide a fresh perspective that helps render supply chains potentially more resilient.
Background:
Previous research on cognitive styles (CSs) has often overlooked their complexity and the effect of the environment on their development. While research supports visual abilities as predictors of domain-specific creativity, there is a lack of studies on the predictive power of CS in relation to creativity beyond abilities.
Aims:
The current study aimed to explore the validity of the CS construct as environmentally sensitive individual differences in cognition. We examined the internal structure of the CS construct, its predictive power in creativity beyond visual abilities, and how CSs of Singaporean secondary school students are shaped with age under specific sociocultural influences (Singapore's emphasis on STEM disciplines).
Sample:
Data were collected from 347 students aged 13-16 from a secondary school in Singapore.
Methods:
Students were administered nine tasks assessing their visual abilities and learning preferences, artistic and scientific creativity, and questionnaires assessing their CS profiles.
Results:
The confirmatory factor analyses provided evidence for a matrix-type CS structure consisting of four orthogonal CS dimensions and third levels of information processing. Structural equation models demonstrated significant contributions of context independence and intuitive processing to artistic and scientific creativity, respectively, beyond visual abilities. The results also suggested that Singapore's education system could be contributing to significantly shaping adolescents' CS profiles.
Conclusions:
Our findings support the validity of CS as individual differences in cognition that develop to cope with environmental demands. They highlight the importance of providing an appropriate environment in shaping adolescents' CS profiles to support the development of domain-specific creativity according to their strengths and talent.
Purpose-This study explored the relationship between employees' cognitive capabilities and firm performance by exploring the moderating role of decision-making style and the mediating effect of knowledge creation. Understanding the role of cognitive capabilities in value creation is crucial for human resource management to achieve the anticipated organizational performance. Design/methodology/approach-Structural equation modeling, cognitive skills theory, cognitive skills acquisition theory and a knowledge creation framework were applied. Findings-The first finding suggests that only A-shaped skills predict higher knowledge creation, while T-shaped skills do not. Second, knowledge creation predicts higher financial performance and a lower level of financial uncertainty. Third, T-shaped skills have no indirect effect on financial performance or financial uncertainty. Fourth, A-shaped skills exerted significant indirect effects on financial performance and uncertainty. Fifth, the rational decision-making style did not moderate the link between knowledge creation and financial performance, as opposed to the intuitive decision-making style. Originality/value-A review of existing research indicates a lack of studies examining the effect of cognitive skills on organizational outcomes and contingencies under which cognitive skills lead to superior outcomes. This study advances research on T-shaped and A-shaped skills and knowledge creation by empirically exploring their interrelationships with financial performance. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are also highlighted.
Status stability, which refers to the stability of team members’ relative status levels, has a profound effect on team effectiveness, but this effect may be either constructive or destructive; the literature has failed to reach consensus on this topic. To reconcile two contradictory views based on differentiating between different types of conflict, we constructed a comprehensive theoretical model of the mechanism underlying the effect of status stability; this model features relationship conflict and task conflict as mediators, status legitimacy as a moderator, and team creativity as an outcome variable. We also proposed four hypotheses on the basis of theoretical analysis. In this study, we used SPSS 23.0, AMOS 24.0 and R software to conduct empirical analysis and testing of 369 valid questionnaires collected from 83 teams using a two-stage measurement method. The results revealed that status stability negatively affects team creativity via task conflict and positively affects team creativity via relationship conflict. However, under the influence of status legitimacy, the negative effect is restrained, while the positive effect is enhanced. This study thus expands the research on the process mechanism and boundary conditions associated with status stability, and can serve as a useful reference for the design of the status structure of modern enterprises.
bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:
A robust body of research supports the use of team charters to purposefully create a team culture with shared norms and expectations. However, student teams often treat this requirement as busywork and fail to invest the effort needed to create team charters that prepare the team to adapt for obstacles that they may encounter.
Situating the case:
Teams that do not engage in effective planning for their collaborations are likely to encounter a range of problems including slackers, domineering teammates, curtailed learning opportunities, and general exclusion from the project work—problems that are often exacerbated on diverse teams and that disproportionately affect marginalized populations.
About the case:
We created three online modules that help students uncover their own tacit expectations for teamwork, share and merge these expectations, and then construct a team charter and task schedules with their teammates.
Methods:
We used a quasiexperimental design comparing team charters from control and experimental groups to understand how our modules affected students’ charters at a university with a highly international population.
Results:
Analyses revealed that control group charters tended to invoke universal team norms and assign punishments for failing to uphold those norms. By contrast, experimental group charters were more flexible, acknowledged competing priorities, evidenced greater planning, and articulated processes that could accommodate individual goals, values, and constraints.
Conclusions:
Charters created after the modules showed more accommodation of difference; however, more research needs to be done to determine whether the more flexible and elaborated charters improve team behaviors.
The study explores the effects of duration of team governance (DTG) on carbon emission intensity of 608 U.S. listed corporations merged three official datasets of Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), Compuatat and BoardEx over the period 2009–2018, using unbalanced panel data analysis. It bridges three theoretical approaches: group development theory (GDT), social identity theory (SIT) and resource dependence theory (RDT) and applies econometric analysis techniques to investigate corporate carbon emission intensity. The result shows an inverted U‐shaped relationship between DTG and carbon emission intensity. It is interesting that carbon emission intensity increased when the duration is less than 6.52 years, however, the duration exceeds 6.52 years decreases carbon emission intensity. We also find other factors of team size and gender diversity moderate the U‐shaped relationship, further testing the optimal team of 8–11 members and 3–4 women members. Meanwhile, the finding shows that the low‐carbon innovation is an effective mediator for DTG to decrease carbon emission intensity. The paper is important for managerial implication and policy making.
During the front end of innovation, teams embody abstract meanings into product concepts. The literature on Innovation of Meaning suggests that focusing on a single product‐user interaction supports this process. This Moment of Meaning facilitates the development of shared meaning and knowledge. We explore how the Moment of Meaning acts as a Boundary Object to support the innovation process.
We study six Innovation of Meaning projects in different companies to explore how the Moment of Meaning supports the transition from abstract meaning to a concrete solution. Attending company meetings and workshops, we collected extensive qualitative data on the usage of the Moment of Meaning.
We identify four uses of the Moment of Meaning. Depending on its degree of abstraction and perspective, it represents a Metaphor, a Product Vision, a Core Feature or an Experience Concept. Our study sheds light on the reification of meanings in early stages of innovation. Also, we highlight the potential evolution of Boundary Objects over time. To managers, we provide actionable knowledge on how a simple boundary object could ease the transition from an innovation strategy to a concrete product concept.
Although researchers have highlighted the importance of diversity beliefs (i.e., team members’ perceived value of diversity) for the elaboration of information in teams, little attention has been paid to whether and how diversity beliefs can be shaped. Drawing on theory and research on team diversity beliefs, we propose that diversity beliefs are more effectively influenced by interventions using a promotion (compared to a prevention) focus toward diversity and personal testimonial (compared to factual) knowledge. Results from an experiment conducted with 175 teams revealed that both a promotion focus and personal testimonial knowledge independently contributed to more positive diversity beliefs and consequently increased team elaboration of task‐relevant information as well as integration of different perspectives. Our results reveal key factors that can influence diversity beliefs and underscore the pivotal role of diversity beliefs in improving the extent to which team members elaborate information and integrate diverse perspectives.
The world is going through an unprecedent experience marked by one of the most serious pandemic to date. Companies currently face multiple challenges, including maintaining their organizational culture while defining and validating new working and business models and completely rethinking past competitive advantages. Innovation is a fundamental part of these processes. This study identifies the main findings in the literature on company culture and the promotion of innovation within organizations. Problem structuring methods (i.e., design thinking (DT) and decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL)) were applied to explore innovation culture further and apply the results to the multinational advertising agency VMLY&R Lisboa in order to delineate this company’s culture and enhance its potential for innovation. An expert panel was recruited to develop a fuller understanding of the cause-effect relationships between factors that influence innovation and to enable a more collaborative, constructivist approach to this decision problem. The main findings were validated by VMLY&R Lisboa’s chief executive officer, and concrete initiatives were proposed that can enhance this company’s innovation culture. The study’s contributions and limitations are also discussed.
Researchers have displayed considerable interest in how and when team cognitive diversity leads to improved or impaired team innovation. When addressing this issue, scholars have adopted the information/decision making and social categorization theoretical perspectives. In contrast, we draw on conservation of resources (COR) theory when examining the cognitive diversity and team innovation relationship. We argue that in a team environment, cognitive diversity may result in the threat of losing valuable resources. This threat, in turn, encourages team members to engage in resource replenishment through the use of different humor styles (i.e., affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, self-defeating). We argue that, with such resource replenishment, four team-level humor styles emerge and mediate the relationship between cognitive diversity and team innovation. In addition, we expect team emotional intelligence to moderate the relationships between cognitive diversity and team humor styles. Our model has important theoretical implications for team diversity, humor, emotional intelligence, and innovation research.
Plain language summary:
Team cognitive diversity can be defined as the extent to which team members differ in their ideas, perspectives, or values. Cognitive diversity is important for teams to cultivate innovation although it may also result in relationship conflicts and the formation of subgroups in a team. Our paper views cognitive diversity as a signal that drives team members to use humor to cope with diversity. This may then result in different humor styles (i.e., affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, self-defeating) that characterize the way the team uses humor. For instance, while working in a cognitively diverse team, team members might make a joke about work that the whole team laughs together (i.e., affiliative humor). However, some members might use sarcasm to insult others who are different from the group norms (i.e., aggressive humor). We argue that the team humor styles will influence team innovation, which in turn will link cognitive diversity with team innovation. Moreover, we suggest that team emotional intelligence will influence the extent to which the four team humor styles link cognitive diversity and team innovation.
The article aims to identify and analyze the roles played by the script in the creative process of independent short film production. The theoretical framework is based on distributed creativity and sociomateriality. These approaches are complementary and helped us discuss how the script can shape the creativity of the subjects involved in the film production. We have followed the daily teamwork during the film production through participant observation, interviews, documents, photographs, and video. We identified three roles played by the script: (1) protagonist: centralizes creative ideas around its framing; (2) feature player: responsible for mediating creative actions, and (3) antagonist: hinders creative actions. Each of these roles directly influences the different stages of the creative process, which takes place through creativity distributed between people and artifacts. We conclude that artifacts have temporary roles in the creative process, and more than enhancing or limiting this process, they are an integral part of creativity. Therefore, humans and artifacts are entangled in the creative process and should not be analyzed separately.
We examine how diversity affects teams' output in the creative uses task. Diversity among team members' experience or knowledge leads to greater creative output; however, diversity over observable characteristics has no measurable impact. Surprisingly, we find no correlation between experiential diversity and diversity over observable characteristics in our sample. We propose that creative organizations can benefit by also emphasizing experiential diversity when constructing diversity policy to foster effective teams.
The goal of this chapter is to synthesize a broad literature on multidisciplinary and/or multicultural creative teams. Furthermore, this chapter will cover both cultural and disciplinary diversity, as these teams face many of the same challenges and opportunities (e.g., Dahlin, Weingart, & Hinds, 2005). This chapter covers (1) definitions and issues surrounding key constructs, (2) the main similarities and differences between cultural and disciplinary diversity, (3) theoretical background, (4) a summary on the relationship between these diverse teams and creativity, conflict, information sharing, and some additional factors, and (5) gaps in the literature and potential future work.
The key aims of this article are to relate the construct of cognitive style to current theories in cognitive psychology and neuroscience and to outline a framework that integrates the findings on individual differences in cognition across different disciplines. First, we characterize cognitive style as patterns of adaptation to the external world that develop on the basis of innate predispositions, the interactions among which are shaped by changing environmental demands. Second, we show that research on cognitive style in psychology and cross-cultural neuroscience, on learning styles in education, and on decision-making styles in business and management all address the same phenomena. Third, we review cognitive-psychology and neuroscience research that supports the validity of the concept of cognitive style. Fourth, we show that various styles from disparate disciplines can be organized into a single taxonomy. This taxonomy allows us to integrate all the well-documented cognitive, learning, and decision-making styles; all of these style types correspond to adaptive systems that draw on different levels of information processing. Finally, we discuss how the proposed approach might promote greater coherence in research and application in education, in business and management, and in other disciplines.
© The Author(s) 2014.
Attaining value from nationality diversity requires active diversity management, which organizations often employ in the form of diversity training programs. Interestingly, however, the previously reported effects of diversity training are often weak and, sometimes, even negative. This situation calls for research on the conditions under which diversity training helps or harms teams. We propose that diversity training can increase team creativity, but only for teams with less positive pretraining diversity beliefs (i.e., teams with a greater need for such training) and that are sufficiently diverse in nationality. Comparing the creativity of teams that attended nationality diversity training versus control training, we found that for teams with less positive diversity beliefs, diversity training increased creative performance when the team's nationality diversity was high, but undermined creativity when the team's nationality diversity was low. Diversity training had less impact on teams with more positive diversity beliefs, and training effects were not contingent upon these teams' diversity. Speaking to the underlying process, we showed that these interactive effects were driven by the experienced team efficacy of the team members. We discuss theoretical and practical implications for nationality diversity management. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Integrating insights from cognitive psychology into current network theory on the social capital of brokering and closed networks, we argue that cognitive style is a critical contingency explaining the relation between social network position and innovative performance. Based on a “complementary fit” argument, we posit that a social network rich in structural holes enhances the innovative performance of employees with an Adaptive cognitive style; however, individuals with an Innovative cognitive style are most innovative when embedded in a closed network of densely interconnected contacts. Using data on the individual cognitive style and complete workplace social network of all employees within a small design and manufacturing firm (n = 68), we show that our theorized contingency mechanism accounts for a large share of empirical variation in employee innovative performance over and above existing social network explanations.
In this paper, we review the growing literature on perceived diversity in teams. We aim to clarify the construct of perceived diversity and organize the findings in this emergent line of research. To do so, we develop a framework integrating research emerging on perceived diversity from across several different research fields. We propose that the nature of perceived diversity and its effects can be best understood by identifying the focal point of the diversity perceptions being studied: perceptions of self-to-team dissimilarity, of subgroup splits, and of group heterogeneity. Our review concludes that perceived self-to-team dissimilarity and perceived subgroup splits mostly have been linked to negative effects for individuals and groups, whereas perceived group heterogeneity has been shown to exert both positive and negative effects on group outcomes. Our review also draws attention to the problem that research on perceived diversity varies not only in definitions and conceptualizations, but also in the methodological approaches towards operationalizing perceived diversity. We conclude by discussing potential areas for future research. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Transactive memory system (TMS) theory has been popularized in recent research on groups and other collectives. In this essay we outline current issues in TMS research and develop propositions that can be tested in future research. We describe issues concerning how researchers define and conceptualize TMSs, interpret the relationship between TMS measures and the TMS concept, and attend to the role of task type in TMS research. The potential to advance TMS research by incorporating multilevel and social network perspectives, reconsidering the role of information technology in supporting TMSs, and developing frameworks suited to complex, multiactivity tasks is considered.
Transactive memory system (TMS) theory has been popularized in recent research on groups and other collectives. In this essay we outline current issues in TMS research and develop propositions that can be tested in future research.We describe issues concerning how researchers define and conceptualize TMSs, interpret the relationship between TMS measures and the TMS concept, and attend to the role of task type in TMS research. The potential to advance TMS research by incorporating multilevel and social network perspectives, reconsidering the role of information technology in supporting TMSs, and developing frameworks suited to complex, multiactivity tasks is considered.
Creativity and innovation in any organization are vital to its successful performance. The authors review the rapidly growing body of research in this area with particular attention to the period 2002 to 2013, inclusive. Conceiving of both creativity and innovation as being integral parts of essentially the same process, we propose a new, integrative definition. We note that research into creativity has typically examined the stage of idea generation, whereas innovation studies have commonly also included the latter phase of idea implementation. The authors discuss several seminal theories of creativity and innovation, then apply a comprehensive levels-of-analysis framework to review extant research into individual, team, organizational, and multi-level innovation. Key measurement characteristics of the reviewed studies are then noted. In conclusion, we propose a guiding framework for future research comprising eleven major themes and sixty specific questions for future studies.
This study investigated team innovation as a process phenomenon by differentiating the creativity stage from the implementation stage. Based on the interactional approach, the authors argue that team composition (aggregated individual creative personality and functional heterogeneity) affects team creativity, which in turn promotes innovation implementation depending on the team’s climate for innovation. Results from a study of 96 primary care teams confirmed that aggregated individual creative personality, as well as functional heterogeneity, promotes team creativity, which in turn interacts with climate for innovation such that team creativity enhances innovation implementation only when climate for innovation is high.
Novelty is an essential feature of creative ideas, yet the building blocks of new ideas are often embodied in existing knowledge.
From this perspective, balancing atypical knowledge with conventional knowledge may be critical to the link between innovativeness
and impact. Our analysis of 17.9 million papers spanning all scientific fields suggests that science follows a nearly universal
pattern: The highest-impact science is primarily grounded in exceptionally conventional combinations of prior work yet simultaneously
features an intrusion of unusual combinations. Papers of this type were twice as likely to be highly cited works. Novel combinations
of prior work are rare, yet teams are 37.7% more likely than solo authors to insert novel combinations into familiar knowledge
domains.
In this study, we investigate how trust affects the performance of ongoing teams. We propose a multiple mediator model in which different team processes act as mediating mechanisms that transmit the positive effects of trust to team performance. Drawing on a data set of ongoing tax consulting teams, we found support for the mediated effects of trust via team monitoring and team effort. Our results did not support the mediating role of “team reflexivity.” These findings contribute to understanding how trust operates within ongoing teams in a way that is distinct from what is known from studies of short-term teams.
This study integrated concepts from upper echelons, group process and social cognition theories to investigate how demographic diversity and group processes influence strategic consensus within the top management team (TMT), where strategic consensus is defined as the degree to which individual mental models of strategy overlap. Data from 76 high-technology firms in the United States and Ireland were used to examine three alternative models. The results showed that while demographic diversity alone did have effects on strategic consensus the overall fit of the model was not strong. Adding two intervening group process variables, interpersonal conflict and agreement-seeking, to the model greatly improved the overall relationship with strategic consensus. For the most part, TMT diversity had negative effects on strategic consensus. The model with superior fit showed both direct and indirect effects of diversity on strategic consensus. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Research on organizational diversity, heterogeneity, and related concepts has prolif- erated in the past decade, but few consistent findings have emerged. We argue that the construct of diversity requires closer examination. We describe three distinctive types of diversity: separation, variety, and disparity. Failure to recognize the meaning, maximum shape, and assumptions underlying each type has held back theory devel- opment and yielded ambiguous research conclusions. We present guidelines for conceptualization, measurement, and theory testing, highlighting the special case of demographic diversity
A multimethod field study of 92 workgroups explored the influence of three types of workgroup diversity (social category diversity, value diversity, and informational diversity) and two moderators (task type and task interdependence) on workgroup outcomes. Informational diversity positively influenced group performance, mediated by task conflict. Value and social category diversity, task complexity, and task interdependence all moderated this effect. Social category diversity positively influenced group member morale. Value diversity decreased satisfaction, intent to remain, and commitment to the group; relationship conflict mediated the effects of value diversity. We discuss the implications of these results for group leaders, managers, and organizations wishing to create and manage a diverse workforce successfully.
Free production of variability through unfettered divergent thinking holds out the seductive promise of effortless creativity, but runs the risk of generating only quasi-creativity or pseudo-creativity if it is not adapted to reality. Thus, creative thinking seems to involve two components: generation of novelty (via divergent thinking) and evaluation of the novelty (via convergent thinking). In the area of convergent thinking, knowledge is of particular importance: It is a source of ideas, suggests pathways to solutions, and provides criteria of effectiveness and novelty. The way in which the two kinds of thinking work together can be understood in terms of thinking styles or of phases in the generation of creative products. In practical situations, divergent thinking without convergent thinking can cause a variety of problems including reckless change. None the less, care must be exercised by those who sing the praises of convergent thinking: Both too little and too much is bad for creativity.
When assembling self-managing work teams, the personalities of team members are often overlooked. One personality variable known to be critical for effective decision making in teams is cognitive style. This study sought to examine how differences and similarities in analytic/intuitive cognitive styles affected the behavior of team members on the task/emotionally expressive dimension identified by Bales. As hypothesized, intuitive individuals and homogeneous intuitive teams were found to initiate more social-emotional acts. Contrary to expectations, intuitive rather than analytic individuals and homogeneous intuitive rather than analytic teams engaged in more task-oriented behaviors. Teams also tended to select intuitive individuals as leaders. The possibility that different combinations of styles may be important for overall team effectiveness was subsequently discussed, and it was suggested that this may depend on whether the nature of the work environment is relatively well structured and mechanistic or relatively unstructured and organic.
Self-attention theory (Carver, 1979, 1984; Carver & Scheier, 1981; Duval & Wicklund, 1972; Mullen, 1983) is concerned with self-regulation processes that occur as a result of becoming the figure of one’s attentional focus. According to self-attention theory, there are three fundamental requirements for any self-regulation of behavior to occur. These requirements are: self-focused attention, a salient behavioral standard, and a sufficiently good outcome expectancy to warrent continued efforts. We will begin by delineating each of these three elements of self-attention theory.
Creativity research has moved from an almost exclusive emphasis on the creative person towards a more balanced inquiry that centers on both individual difference issues and questions about the nature of creative products and the conditions that facilitate their creation. Over 30 years of research show that product creativity can be reliably and validly assessed based on the consensus of experts. The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) proposes that independent raters familiar with a product domain, persons who have not conferred with one another or received special training, are best able to decide whether one product is more creative than another. Although product creativity may be difficult to characterize, it is something that people can recognize and agree upon when they see it.
The growing research literature on cognitive diversity in teams has multidisciplinary and international relevance. However, the varied conceptual and operational definitions restrict theory development and comparisons of empirical results. The purpose of the present article is to provide guidance for the systematic study of cognitive diversity and team functioning. We demonstrate that organization of the literature is necessary and offer an organizing heuristic based on the stability of the cognitive diversity conceptualization. Using this framework, we review the empirical findings for the effects of cognitive diversity on team criteria. Then, we address methodological issues and describe the manners in which cognitive diversity has been composed to the team level. Following each section we offer summary findings, critique the state of the literature, and offer guidance for future research. There are opportunities for researchers to enhance precision in theory and measurement and for integration across disciplines.
Integrating macro and micro theoretical perspectives, we conducted a meta-analysis examining the role of contextual factors in team diversity research. Using data from 8,757 teams in 39 studies conducted in organizational settings, we examined whether contextual factors at multiple levels, including industry, occupation, and team, influenced the performance outcomes of relations-oriented and task-oriented diversity. The direct effects were very small yet significant, and after we accounted for industry, occupation, and team-level contextual moderators, they doubled or tripled in size. Further, occupation- and industry-level moderators explained significant variance in effect sizes across studies.
This paper reviews aspects of two largely disparate literatures from the adjacent fields of individual and organizational learning and identifies some implications for theory and practice. The focus of attention is the extent to which the individual level construct cognitive style can be meaningfully applied to aid the understanding of learning at the level of the organization as well as at the level of the individual. Attention is given to the ways in which consideration of cognitive style can improve the effectiveness of interventions designed to improve individual and organizational performance. Nine categories of intervention are identified.
Researchers have identified three indicators of the existence of transactive memory systems (Lewis, 2003; Moreland et al., 1998): knowledge or memory specialization (the tendency for group members to remember different aspects of a task or to develop specialized and complementary expertise), task credibility (how much group members trust each other's knowledge), and task coordination (the ability of group members to work together smoothly and efficiently while performing a task). This meta knowledge of who knows what provides individuals with access to more knowledge than they individually possess. Further, the knowledge enables the group to specialize such that individuals with expertise in a specific domain take responsibility for remembering knowledge, performing tasks in the domain, and answering questions from other team members about that domain. Through performing tasks and answering questions, a member establishes credibility and expertise status. Thus, other members come to trust his or her expertise, which is another indicator of the operation of a transactive memory system. Other members, being aware of the person's expertise, direct new knowledge in the domain to him or her, which reinforces the person's specialization. Further, members know whom to count on for performing various tasks and whom to consult for information in particular domains, which improves coordination. Coordination is another indicator of the operation of a transactive memory system.
SUMMARY—As the workplace has become increasingly diverse, there has been a tension between the promise and the reality of diversity in team process and performance. The optimistic view holds that diversity will lead to an increase in the variety of perspectives and approaches brought to a problem and to opportunities for knowledge sharing, and hence lead to greater creativity and quality of team performance. However, the preponderance of the evidence favors a more pessimistic view: that diversity creates social divisions, which in turn create negative performance outcomes for the group.
The recent business trends of globalization and increasing ethnic and gender diversity are turning managers' attention to the management of cultural differences. The management literature has suggested that organizations should value diversity to enhance organizational effectiveness. However, the specific link between managing diversity and organizational competitiveness is rarely made explicit and no article has reviewed actual research data supporting such a link. This article reviews arguments and research data on how managing diversity can create a competitive advantage. We address cost, attraction of human resources, marketing success, creativity and innovation, problem-solving quality, and organizational flexibility as six dimensions of business performance directly impacted by the management of cultural diversity. We then offer suggestions for improving organizational capability to manage this diversity.
Information elaboration enables functionally diverse teams to transform their breadth of knowledge resources into actionable solutions to complex problems. The current study advances information elaboration theory and research in two ways. First, we identify how team ability and social motivation composition characteristics provide the psychological origins of complex information processing efforts. Second, we identify environmental turbulence as an important boundary condition, clarifying when information elaboration benefits team performance and when it does not. These ideas were tested in a sample of 4-person self-managed teams (N = 68) which were functionally diverse and performed a cooperative strategic decision-making task. Results indicate that cognitive ability equips teams with the “can do” ability for complex elaboration efforts through emergent team mental models, whereas low preferences for self-reliance provide the “will do” motivation for in-depth information exchange through collective leadership. In turn, teams benefited from information elaboration in turbulent but not stable environments.
Temporal individual differences are an under-explored, but research-worthy form of diversity in teams. Although persistent differences in how members think about and value time can profoundly influence team performance, the compositional impact of time-based individual differences is regularly overlooked. Optimal or suboptimal team performance can result because the composition of time-based individual differences is matched or unmatched (respectively) to task demands. Therefore, we offer a detailed presentation of how the configuration of four time-based individual differences (time urgency, time perspective, polychronicity, and pacing style) interact with two task typologies (task type and task complexity) to specify when elevation (mean) and diversity (dispersion) of temporal differences is helpful or harmful to team performance.
In the rapidly changing, more competitive new economy, teams need to engage in divergent thinking in which they put aside typical assumptions. However, the deck seems to be stacked against teams as the agents of creativity. Indeed, teams excel at convergent thinking, but it is individuals who excel at divergent thinking. In this article, the four key obstacles to creative teamwork are identified and described. Then, ten techniques for enhancing creative teamwork are outlined that most teams or workgroups can put into place. These techniques have all been proven effective in enhancing creativity and are extremely cost-effective.
Creativity often leads to the development of original ideas that are useful or influential, and maintaining creativity is crucial for the continued development of organizations in particular, and society in general. Most research and writing has focused on individual creativity, yet in recent years, there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of the social and contextual factors in creativity. Even with the information explosion and the growing necessity for specialization, the development of innovations still requires group interaction at various stages in the creative process. Most organizations increasingly rely on the work of creative teams where each individual is an expert in a particular area. This book summarizes the exciting new research developments on the processes involved in group creativity and innovation, and explores the relationship between group processes, group context and creativity. It draws from a broad range of research perspectives, including those investigating cognition, groups, creativity, information systems and organizational psychology. The first section in this book focuses on how group decision making is affected by factors such as cognitive fixation and flexibility, group diversity, minority dissent, group decision-making, brainstorming and group support systems. Special attention is devoted to the various processes and conditions which can inhibit or facilitate group creativity. The second section explores how various contextual and environmental factors affect the creative processes of groups. The chapters explore issues of group autonomy, group socialization, mentoring, team innovation, knowledge transfer and creativity, at the level of cultures, and societies.
An increasing number of organizations are turning to teams for innovation and creativity. The present study investigated the effects of team knowledge management (TKM) on the creativity and financial performance of organizational teams. Our analysis of data collected from 65 sales teams, across 35 branches of a Korean insurance company, showed that team knowledge utilization (but not team knowledge stock) was positively related to team creativity, which in turn predicted team financial performance over the 6-month period. The positive effects of knowledge utilization were stronger when team leaders had a systematic cognitive style and when teams were exposed to high environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, the systematic cognitive style of leaders had a positive main effect on team creativity and positively moderated the relationship between team knowledge stock and team creativity. The implications of these findings were considered, and some possible directions for future research were suggested.
This paper reviews aspects of two largelydisparate literatures from the adjacent fields ofindividual and organizational learning and identifiessome implications for theory and practice. The focus of attention is the extent to which the individuallevel construct cognitive style can be meaningfullyapplied to aid the understanding of learning at thelevel of the organization as well as at the level of the individual. Attention is given to theways in which consideration of cognitive style canimprove the effectiveness of interventions designed toimprove individual and organizational performance. Nine categories of intervention areidentified.