Practices to Improve Group Creativity: A Longitudinal Field Investigation

Emergent teams are ad hoc part-time teams of strangers with very different perspectives who are asked by their company to come together and solve novel strategic problems. Most research on creativity has focused on individuals, with relatively little research on practices to improve group creativity. In this study we build upon our earlier qualitative research and longitudinally surveyed members of 31 different teams varying in the level of emergence. At three points in time, we asked team members about the practices they used to manage their creative process, focusing particularly on two practices: maintaining engagement, and co-creating shared boundary objects. We found that, these practices affected the customer's assessment of the team's innovativeness, but the timing of when these practices were introduced was critical. Implications for design of information systems includes 1) allowing members to maintain their engagement with the team's process even as they leave to attend to other activities and then rejoin the team, and 2) facilitate the co-creation of shared boundary objects early in the team's process. For managers, this research suggests the need to train team members in these two practices in order to further the innovative process.