A Group Approach to Team Creativity

Abstract

Are new products accomplished by highly creative individuals, or by creative teams? This paper will start from the assumption that some creative team achievements cannot be reduced to the work of separate team members. Does this assumption mean that some major strands of research on creativity become irrelevant to the study of new product development, as new products are often developed by teams. And has research on group creativity grown to the extent that it can be used as a vantage point for studying new product development? The present paper will discuss these questions, arguing that recent studies suggesting a relation between group diversity and group creativity do offer some notable insights, but also arguing that a paradox seems to emerge: The same requirement of ‘shared views’ that is supposed to be for team functioning may be harmful for creativity. Suggestions are made to deal with this paradox, in particular Fiol’s proposal to open up the concept of consensus, and an argument that starts from Allen’s observation that engineers integrate ‘messages’ rather than generating completely new ideas.

After a brief discussion of research on idea-generation techniques, the paper concludes that research on the creativity of organizational teams must take the organizational context into account, by distinguishing different ways to organize innovation and by acknowledging that the perceptions (or judgments) of others in the organization are relevant if an answer is to be given on some basic questions: Is this a creative group? Is this a creative idea?