Sarah Harvey

Collective Engagement in Creative Tasks The Role of Evaluation in the Creative Process in Groups

Research on group creativity has concentrated on explaining how the group context influences idea generation and has conceptualized the evaluation of creative ideas as a process of convergent decision making that takes place after ideas are generated to improve the quality of the group’s creative output. We challenge this view by exploring the situated nature of evaluations that occur throughout the creative process. We present an inductive qualitative process analysis of four U.S. healthcare policy groups tasked with producing creative output in the form of policy recommendations to a federal agency. Results show four modes of group interaction, each with a distinct form of evaluation: brainstorming without evaluation, sequential interactions in which one idea was generated and evaluated, parallel interactions in which several ideas were generated and evaluated, and iterative interactions in which the group evaluated several ideas in reference to the group’s goals. Two of the groups in our study followed an evaluation-centered sequence that began with evaluating a small set of ideas. Surprisingly, doing so did not impede the groups’ creativity. To explain this, we develop an alternative conceptualization of evaluation as a generative process that shapes and guides collective creativity.

A Dynamic Perspective on Diverse Teams: Moving from the Dual-Process Model to a Dynamic Coordination-based Model of Diverse Team Performance

AbstractThe existing literature on diverse teams suggests that diversity is both helpful to teams in making more information available and encouraging creativity and damaging to teams in reducing cohesion and information sharing. Thus the extant literature suggests that diversity within teams is a double-edged sword that leads to both positive and negative effects simultaneously. This literature has not, however, fully embraced the increasing calls in the broader groups literature to take account of time in understanding how groups function [e.g. Cronin, M. A., Weingart, L. R., & Todorova, G. (2011). Dynamics in groups: Are we there yet? The Academy of Management Annals, 5, 571–612]. We review the literature on diverse teams employing this lens to develop a dynamic perspective that takes account of the timing and flow of diversitys effects. Our review suggests that diversity in groups has different short-term and long-term effects in ways that are not fully captured by the currently dominant double-edged...

The Process of Team Boundary Spanning in Multi-Organizational Contexts

Work teams must increasingly operate in complex environments characterized by multiple external actors beyond team and organizational boundaries. Although previous research demonstrates the importance of boundary spanning activities to team effectiveness, it reveals relatively little about the process of boundary spanning in these environments. In this article, we investigated the processes of boundary spanning across multiple external actors in 10 cross-organizational teams. We identified three sequences for reaching out to external actors: (a) moving inside-out from vertical actors inside the host organization to horizontal actors outside of the host organization, (b) moving outside-in from horizontal actors to vertical, and (c) staying-inside with vertical actors from the host organization. Our observations suggest that inside-out and outside-in sequences were more successful than simply pleasing the host organization. We build on our empirical findings to develop a process theory of how team boundary spanning activities across multiple external actors influence team effectiveness. Our research underscores the importance of a team’s interactions with actors in its external environment beyond those in an immediate supervisory role and provides insight into the dynamics of boundary spanning in multi-organizational contexts.

Power and Interdependence in Organizations: Leadership and conflict: Using power to manage conflict in groups for better rather than worse

Introduction One of the greatest challenges for leaders is to use their power in ways that effectively manage conflict. Conflict pervades the life of all groups. Sometimes, conflict benefits the group and its members by providing new information and helping members to see new ways of thinking about their work. However, conflict also typically feels uncomfortable and may be interpreted as a personal attack or a personality clash, even when it benefits the quality of a groups decision-making. The challenge for team leaders is, therefore, to exercise power in a way that promotes the potential information-processing benefits of conflict while minimizing the relationship risks associated with expressions of power to resolve conflict. To achieve this, we argue that leaders are more likely to lead their groups to better performance with indirect expressions of power such as managing group process rather than outcomes, because indirect expressions of power are both less likely to elicit reactance on the part of the team members and more likely to create a sense of psychological safety between leaders and followers. Anyone who has worked in a team – from an amateur sports team to a community task force to a professional consulting team – will have experienced some amount of conflict. Conflict is inevitable in group life because people have different backgrounds, experiences, values, personalities and ideas that cannot help but influence the way that members interact with each other.

When Accuracy Isn’t Everything The Value of Demographic Differences to Information Elaboration in Teams

Information elaboration is the mechanism through which diverse group members share unique knowledge and perspectives to form better and more creative responses to tasks. However, little is known about the conditions under which group members will be willing and motivated to engage in information elaboration. This article presents a field study conducted in an energy company to investigate that issue. Regression analysis of survey responses suggests that group members who have deep, underlying differences in perspective from the group engage in less information elaboration, particularly if they perceive themselves as similar to the group. Recognizing deep-level differences is helpful, however, when an individual also differs from the group in surface-level characteristics, because those differences improve information elaboration. This finding suggests that surface-level diversity prompts group members to understand and appreciate their deep-level differences.