Diversity and Creativity

Hoever’s dissertation investigates the conditions and processes that enable teams to develop more creative solutions and optimally use their informational resources for higher creativity. Whereas teams, especially those composed of members with different task-relevant information and perspectives, are considered a particularly viable means to the end of higher creativity, systematic research on the factors that facilitate team creativity and the processes conducive to it is sparse and its findings remain fragmented to date. The three empirical studies included in this dissertation contribute to a more complete understanding of how teams achieve creative outcomes by addressing different aspects of this question. Hoever’s findings highlight that other-focused behaviours such as perspective taking and mutual feedback between team members represent important mechanisms to bring out the potential of team diversity for team creativity. Furthermore, on the basis of an in-depth behavioural observation of the teams throughout their creative process, she was able to develop a more nuanced understanding of the processes that underlie these observed effects. This analysis yields converging evidence for the importance of information elaboration as a precursor of higher creativity in diverse teams but not for other processes frequently suggested to transmit the benefits of diversity when they occur. Finally, the reported research points to the differential impact of formal external interventions in shaping team processes and information processing mechanisms in teams with diverse informational resources. Together, the reported research has important implications for future work on team creativity, diversity, and team processes. With regards to team creativity and diversity the results call into question the straightforward nature of the frequently proposed link between diversity and creativity and highlight a number of important moderators of this effect. Moreover, the findings indicate that the relationship between creativity and its antecedents at the team level do not fully mirror the effects observed at the individual level of analysis. Finally, they direct attention to the need to systematically investigate the extent to which diverse and homogeneous teams react differently to common managerial interventions such as feedback

Different strokes for different teams:the contingent effects of positive and negative feedback on the creativity of informationally homogeneous and diverse teams

Feedback is a ubiquitous management tool. Employing this tool to meet the new challenge of enhancing team creativity, raises the important question of whether positive or negative feedback is more effective. Unfortunately prior research on feedback valence and creativity is limited to the individual level, neglecting team creativity’s interdependent and knowledge-intensive nature. We address this issue and advance the team information processing perspective on team creativity by integrating two heretofore separate research streams to develop a team-specific model about how negative and positive feedback enhance creativity via two alternative information processing routes, contingent on teams’ informational diversity. Negative feedback fuels teams’ systematic effort and attention to external, novel information. In informationally diverse teams, in which members hold different information and perspectives, these efforts promote team creativity through information elaboration. Conversely, positive feedback propels members to flexibly use their information and contribute the resultant divergent insights to the team. In informationally homogeneous teams, where these insights relate to others’ information and perspectives, these divergent insights trigger teams’ generative processing and in turn creativity. Results from a team experiment support the predicted feedback valence by informational diversity interaction on team creativity through elaboration and generative processing

How to boost creativity within diverse teams

Researchers and managers alike have often portrayed diversity as a key driver of team creativity. However, recent findings suggest that getting team members to take their fellow workers’ perspective is essential to the process of benefiting from diversity