Individual Creativity and Team Climate in Software Development Projects: The Mediating Role of Team Decision Processes

This study investigates how individual creativity is related to the quality of team decision processes and team climate, and the mediating role of team decision processes between individual creativity and team climate. A multi‐level theoretical model was proposed and partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS‐SEM) was conducted on a sample of 139 software development projects. The results suggest that: (i) individual creativity improves the quality of team decision processes, (ii) team decision processes are positively associated with four dimensions of team climate (organizational support, innovation orientation, goal orientation and informal structure), and (iii) team decision processes partially mediate between individual creativity and team climate. In particular, the obtained results stress the role of individual creativity in the formation and evolution of a positive climate by means of team decision processes. The study implies that managers should recognize the value of creative individuals as the basic source of competitive advantage and success. It further discusses the managerial implications of the findings as well as limitations and constructive new directions for future studies to improve software development team performance.     

Stimulating the Potential: Creative Performance and Communication in Innovation Teams

Creativity is essential to successful new product development efforts. Teams constitute the organizing principle in most modern innovation activities. Although creativity research has revealed many factors influencing individual creativity, little is known about how team‐level creativity is determined. Since the creative innovation task requires teams to combine and integrate input from multiple team members, the team's communication pattern is an important determinant of team creativity. Based on a sample of 44 NPD teams in eleven companies, this study examines the effects of team‐member communication on team creativity. It is found that both interaction frequency and subgroup‐formation of communication have a negative relationship to team creativity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed, and further research is indicated.     

Effects of task complexity on individual creativity through knowledge interaction: A comparison of temporary and permanent teams

Using the interactionist’s perspective of creativity, this paper proposes a new research model of creativity manifestation to explore how factors affecting individual creativity depend on team characteristics. We investigated the antecedents of creativity in the literature—task complexity, team member exchange, and knowledge sharing—and then examined the relationships and differences between temporary and permanent teams. To maximize practical implications, we studied two team types like project task force (PTF) and research and development (R&D) teams in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) industry in Korea, where strong creativity is required for team performance. PTF teams operate with a clear mission to be completed on a deadline, while R&D teams create scientific enhancements for existing products. The proposed structural model was tested empirically with cross-sectional data from 289 professionals from the two team types. Results indicated that, in the case of PTF teams, task complexity had an indirect relationship with individual complexity through knowledge interaction among team members, while for R&D teams, task complexity was directly associated with individual creativity, and indirectly associated with the creativity through team member exchange. Thus, team characteristics must be considered together with task complexity and knowledge interactions in order to achieve team goals more effectively by maximizing each member’s creativity.     

Why is Your Team More Creative Than Mine? The Influence of Shared Mental Models on Intra‐group Conflict,Team Creativity and Effectiveness

In competitive and dynamic contexts team members need to be creative to ensure that teams achieve high levels of performance and feel satisfied with their work. At the same time, team members need to have a shared understanding regarding relevant aspects related to task accomplishment and team interaction. In this study we investigate the mediating mechanisms of intra‐group conflict and creativity in the relationship between shared mental models and team effectiveness (team performance and satisfaction). We tested our model in a sample of 161 teams (735 individuals) performing in a management simulation. We collected data at three time points. Our results suggest that high shared mental models are related to low levels of intra‐group conflict, foster creativity, and in turn improve team performance and satisfaction. These findings contribute to a scarce thematic – the relationship between shared mental models and creativity – emphasizing the importance of a shared understanding for creativity and team effectiveness.     

Development and Validation of Team Creativity Measures: A Complex Systems Perspective

Without formalizing the team creativity (TC) concept with reliable and valid measurement, it is difficult to conduct rigorous research to help teams generate creative ideas and problem solving at a high level, of good quality and great value. The one‐sidedness and lack of depth of existing research on team creativity leads to the limited reliability and validity of team creativity measurements. In order to solve these problems, we introduce the complex system theory and develop the TC Scale with nine items for team creativity from three dimensions: team creative thinking, team creative action and team creative outcome. The data is collected from three distinct positions of respondents (managers, team leaders and senior staff) in 183 creative teams. The results of reliability measures, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis strongly support our scale. Further, we test the correlation between team trust and team creativity to establish its predictive validity and make a further verification on the scale structure through second‐order confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, we discuss the implications for research and practice.     

Does a Creative Designer Necessarily Translate into the Creative Design of a Product? Exploring Factors Facilitating the Creativity of a New Product

Product creativity is a rarely studied topic in the area of new product development; nevertheless, its importance has been recognized by many researchers in a variety of fields. In this research, two studies were conducted: the first was quantitative and the second was qualitative. These studies examined the relationships among five variables: analogical thinking ability, creative self‐efficacy, length of experience, team climate for creativity and product creativity. The results of a multiple regression indicated that analogical thinking ability is an antecedent of design creativity, and that creative self‐efficacy is a mediator between them. The results also showed that length of experience and team climate for creativity have significant moderating effects. These findings indicate that both person‐based (i.e., ability, self‐efficacy and length of experience) and situation‐based (team climate) variables are key factors in developing the creative design of a new product.     

Entrepreneurial Leadership and New Ventures: Creativity in Entrepreneurial Teams

This study tests the view that new venture's innovative capability is influenced by the interaction of a lead entrepreneur's leadership and his or her entrepreneurial team members' creativity, as measured by the creation of patents. Focusing on 112 entrepreneurial teams in Taiwan's high‐tech new ventures, the findings suggest that lead entrepreneurs who are risk‐taking, pro‐active and innovative can stimulate their entrepreneurial team members' creativity. Moreover, new venture's innovative capability can be improved by the joint contribution of higher entrepreneurial leadership and more creativity in entrepreneurial teams. The findings also imply that the contingent impact of creativity in teams on the leadership–innovation relationship needs to be considered.     

Understanding the Benefits and Detriments of Conflict on Team Creativity Process

Intra‐team conflict research has shown the different effects of conflict on team output, but it has not fully addressed how conflict influences the team creativity process in different task types of project teams over the project life cycle. Conflict, project life cycle, and project types are important predictors of team creativity. This paper focuses on examining the degree of conflict that the different types of project teams experienced, and more specifically this paper seeks to understand the benefits and detriments of conflict on the team creativity process. Furthermore, this paper shows that the project life cycle is a significant moderator of the conflict‐creativity relationship in different project teams.     

Cultural Diversity in Entrepreneurial Teams: Findings of New Ventures in Germany

This paper explores how entrepreneurs from different national cultures deal with cultural diversity of their entrepreneurial teams. The explorative research looks at six case studies in different stages of the venture process. The paper delivers insights from early to later phases of start‐ups. From the case‐study research and theoretic considerations the paper develops different propositions. Core findings are: first, in cross‐cultural teams monochronic/low‐context/high‐space entrepreneurs strongly structure tasks. Second, polychronic/high‐context/low‐space founders tend to supply external contacts to the diverse team. Third, polychronic/high‐context/low‐space founders have a propensity to stimulate communication procedures. Fourth, enhanced communication in cross‐cultural teams seems to be related to creativity. At last, monochronic/low‐context/high‐space founders tend to deny positive effects from cultural diversity.     

Psychological Safety,Knowledge Sharing,and Creative Performance in Healthcare Teams

We examined how psychological safety fosters knowledge‐sharing processes and enables team creative performance. Using a multi‐respondent design, we tested our hypotheses using survey data collected from 73 patient‐centred healthcare teams working in the field on rare diseases. The data were analysed using latent class regression analysis. We confirmed that a high level of psychological safety within the team is a significant predictor of creative team performance and is mediated by the sharing of two types of knowledge: information and know‐how.     

Antecedents of team innovation in health care teams

We extend previous research on team innovation by looking at team‐level motivations and how a prosocial team environment, indicated by the level of helping behaviour and information‐sharing, may foster innovation. Hypotheses were tested in two independent samples of health care teams (N₁ = 72 teams, N₂ = 113 teams), using self‐report measures. The examples of team innovation given by the individual team members were then rated for innovativeness by independent health care experts to avoid common method bias for the outcome variable. Subsequently, the data was aggregated and analysed at team level. The study was part of a larger data‐gathering effort on health care teams in the UK. Results supported the hypotheses of main effects of both information‐sharing and helping behaviour on team innovation and interaction effects with team size and occupational diversity. Differences in findings between types of health care teams can be attributed to differences in team tasks and functions. The results suggest ways in which helping and information‐sharing may act as buffers against constraints in team work, such as large team size or high occupational diversity in cross‐functional health care teams, and potentially turn these into resources supporting team innovation rather than acting as barriers.     

How Team Identification and Expertise Identification Affect R&D Employees' Creativity

The relationship between team identification and expertise identification in the R&D context and the mechanism by which these variables influence R&D creativity is not yet clear. We present and empirically test a theoretical framework proposing that knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between identification and creativity in R&D teams. Based on 120 paired‐sample survey data of 30 R&D teams, we show that knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between team identification (but not expertise identification) and R&D team members' creativity. Contributions to the literature and the practice of innovation and R&D management, knowledge and creativity management, and team management are discussed.     

Employee Goal Orientation,Work Unit Goal Orientation and Employee Creativity

For employee creativity to occur, organizations must build a context conducive to creativity, in addition to identifying employees with creative potential. Complementing and extending earlier research, we develop and test a cross‐level model about how work unit goal orientation might relate to employee creativity. We also theorize and examine the mediating role of employee information elaboration linking work unit goal orientation and employee creativity. We conduct a questionnaire survey based on multi‐source data from 340 employees comprising 53 teams in eight Taiwanese organizations. The results indicate that the work unit goal orientation is positively, whereas the work unit performance‐avoidance orientation is negatively, related to employee creativity through employee information elaboration. Furthermore, work unit goal orientation also plays a cross‐level moderating role: the positive relationship between individual‐level learning orientation and information elaboration is stronger when work unit learning orientation is higher, but weaker when work unit avoidance orientation is higher.     

Factors Influencing Creativity in Virtual Design Teams: An Interplay between Technology,Teams and Individuals

Creativity is a topic of interest across numerous disciplines and areas of study. Creativity constitutes a challenging aspect of engineering design, and scholars in the field of management claim that the increase in virtual teamwork calls for research as to how virtual configurations alter some of the management practices based on the collocated workplace. By reviewing the different literatures, we posit a knowledge gap regarding creativity in the virtual design context, where varying degrees of virtuality are likely to exert an influence on creativity. In our quest to start bridging this gap, we pursued an exploratory case study with a student‐based virtual design team project, known as the European Global Product Realization (EGPR). Thirty‐nine interview extracts, covering most participants, along with non‐participant observation and document review, gave us insights into the nature of the project, the participants' perceptions of creativity, and their experience of designing in virtual teams. In all, our study unearths and discusses a number of factors – and the extent to which – they are found to influence creativity in virtual design teams. The study has cross‐domain relevance from those interested in the management of virtual teams through to those looking at creativity and design.     

Organizing Individual and Collective Creativity: Flying in the Face of Creativity Clichés

The growing complexity of problems requires collective solutions to produce creative outcomes. Organizational theory on creativity has been extensively developed in recent decades, but two problematic issues remain. First, no current comprehensive model explains the development of collective creativity. Second, no empirical research has been conducted on the process of theory dissemination and its relevance within the managerial community. This paper provides evidence which can inform the design of collective creative projects within organizations, flying in the face of some managerial clichés. We design a research project which enables managerial sensemaking to emerge and which proposes a comprehensive approach to the design of team creativity. From a research design involving 24 managers and 98 eleven‐person groups, results confirm that creativity is not only about creative genius, and design for creativity is not a matter of linear correlation but implies a more sophisticated and integrative approach according to which individual creative skills, team dynamics and organizational solutions interact with each other to produce a collective creative performance.     

Individual Creativity during the Ideation Phase of Product Innovation: An Interactional Perspective

Although there is increasing acknowledgement that employees' creative ideas are fundamental for product innovation, and many companies use cross‐functional teams to increase employee creativity, there has been little empirical testing of how individual personality and group context interactively affect individual creativity. The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine the relationship between personality and individual creativity; to assess how this relationship interacts with group diversity; and to determine whether the interaction effects between personality traits and gender diversity are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. The results of an experiment based on a sample of 142 working adults show that openness to experience and extraversion are positively related to individual creativity, whereas neuroticism and conscientiousness are negatively related to individual creativity. Furthermore, the impacts of openness to experience and extraversion on individual creativity, respectively, are moderated by both functional diversity and gender diversity. In addition, these interaction effects are mediated by individual knowledge sharing. Interestingly, this study also finds that the direction of functional diversity's moderating effects depends on the level of group diversity.     

Antecedents of Team Creativity: An Examination of Team Emotional Intelligence,Team Trust and Collaborative Culture

Teams represent a dominant approach to getting work done in a business environment. Creativity enables teams to solve problems and leverage opportunities through the integration of divergent thoughts and perspectives. Prior research indicates that a collaborative culture, which affects how team members interact and work together, is a critical antecedent of team creativity. This study explores other antecedents of team creativity, namely, team emotional intelligence and team trust, and investigates the relationships among these precursors to creative effort. Using a survey of 82 student teams at a large university in the northeast United States, our findings suggest that team emotional intelligence promotes team trust. Trust, in turn, fosters a collaborative culture which enhances the creativity of the team. Cognitive trust also moderates the relationship between collaborative culture and team creativity. Implications of these results for managers and academics are discussed.     

The Climate for Creativity and Change in Teams

This article reports the results of a study conducted to examine the ability of the Situational Outlook Questionnaire (SOQ^TM) to effectively discern climates that either encourage or discourage creativity and the ability to initiate change in a team setting. The purpose of the study is to examine the concurrent criterion–related validity of the SOQ. The article explores the characteristics in an organisational climate that promote teamwork and some of the tripwires one needs to be aware of in the formation and management of teams. Nine dimensions of the climate for creativity and change as measured by the Situational Outlook Questionnaire are put forward and defined in relation to teams. The methodology and results of the study are reported. The results show that when subjects (N7equals;154) complete the SOQ based on their recollection of a best– and worst–case team experience, the measure is able to consistently and significantly discriminate between the two types of experiences. Conclusions, implications, and areas for future research to further examine the validity of the SOQ are explored.     

Interdisciplinary Heterogeneity as a Catalyst for Product Innovativeness of Entrepreneurial Teams

Although more and more ventures are successfully founded by entrepreneurial teams, the specific benefits of the team‐based founding approach have received little attention in extant empirical studies. This study explores the relationship between the level of interdisciplinary heterogeneity in entrepreneurial teams and the level of product innovativeness in high‐tech ventures. It is proposed that an interdisciplinary new venture team composition impacts the quality of the strategic planning process (scanning activities, planning openness) and thereby indirectly shapes product innovativeness. The hypotheses are investigated using data from a sample of Canadian high‐tech ventures. The findings provide support for the proposed relationship between team heterogeneity, strategic planning and product innovativeness. Venture capitalists, university faculty and incubator institutions are therefore well advised to direct their attention towards fostering a heterogeneous composition of founding teams.     

Team Polarity and Creative Performance in Innovation Teams

Creativity is essential for research and development efforts. Research and development endavours are typically organized in teams. Unfortunately, little is known about how the polarity or in other words the conflict potential determines the creativity of such teams. Based on a sample of 51 research and development teams (R&D teams), this study examines the effects of polarity on team creativity and attemps to explore situational conditions when conflict potential is detrimental or facilitating R&D team creativity. The results show that foremost in the conceptualization phase of R&D efforts polarity positively influences the creative performance of R&D teams, whereas at lower degrees of complexity or in situations later in the development cycle polarity negatively impacts the creative performance of R&D teams.