Thought Leadership Articles
Creativity in Groups and Teams
By Anne E. Herman, Ph.D., Kenexa Research Institute
Most of the work on creative thought processes has focused on understanding these at the individual level (Mumford, Mobley, Uhlman, Reiter-Palmon & Doares, 1991; Ward, Smith & Finke, 1999). We have only limited information about how these cognitive processes operate at the team level or group level. Understanding how creativity operates at the team level is especially important because many of our organizations utilize teams as the primary unit of employee arrangement. This article will review what we know about how some of the cognitive components of creativity (problem construction, information search and gathering, idea generation, idea evaluation and selection) are influenced by group and team dynamics.