Fostering team creativity: Perspective taking as key to unlocking diversity's potential

Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking. We propose that perspective taking helps realize the creative benefits of diversity of perspectives by fostering information elaboration. Results of a laboratory experiment support the hypothesized interaction between diversity and perspective taking on team creativity. Diverse teams performed more creatively than homogeneous teams when they engaged in perspective taking, but not when they were not instructed to take their team members' perspectives. Team information elaboration was found to mediate this moderated effect and was associated with a stronger indirect effect than mere information sharing or task conflict. Our results point to perspective taking as an important mechanism to unlock diversity's potential for team creativity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).     

Knowledge of sex-role stereotypes in children aged 3 to 5

When do children begin acquiring adult sex-role stereotypes? This study examined the sex-stereotypic knowledge of four groups of young children: 3.0–3.5, 3.5–4.0, 4.0–4.5, and 4.5–5.0 years old. To assess the development of their knowledge, the same children were retested six months later. Evidence of sex-stereotyping appeared at 3.5 years and increased both across the different age groups and within the same children as they aged. The children's knowledge encompassed both feminine and masculine traits, and was related to general intellectual development. These results are interpreted as supporting cognitive-developmental theories that children learn sex-role stereotypes as structural rules for organizing and understanding behaviors present in their social environment.Thanks are due to Diane Bulow, Grace Horsman, Barbara Kutner, Joan Strutts, and the other teachers for aiding our access to children enrolled in their centers. Moira Davidson, Beth Kaplan, Keith Miller, Suzanna Nam, Dan Birecree, Sara Corse, Jim Gilbert, Jean Merenda, Anna Steiner, and Steve Tannenbaum served graciously as testers.     

The Relationship between Individualism—Collectivism and Job Satisfaction

On a exploré dans trois recherches la relation entre la satisfaction professionnelle et les mentalités individualiste ou communautaire. Dans la première, une étude de niveau écologique, nous avons trouvé des corrélations à la limite de seuil de signification entre l'indice d'individualisme de Hofstede et des attitudes défavorables envers la communication et les relations professionnelles; toutes deux relèvent des aspects inter-individuels du travail. Pour la deuxième recherche, c'est un échantillon d'employés chinois de Hong Kong qui ont fourni les données. Les employés présentant un sentiment communautaire se montraient plus satisfaits de leur travail, de leur salaire, de leur promotion, de leur encadrement et de leurs collègues que leurs homologues individualistes. La troisième étude a retrouvé les résultats de la deuxième avec un échantillon d'employés d'un niveau plus modeste.
The relationship between individualism-collectivism and job satisfaction was explored in three studies. In the first, ecological-level, study, we found marginally significant correlations between Hofstede's individualism index and unfavourable attitudes towards working relationships and communication, both being interpersonal aspects of work. In the second study, data were collected from a sample of Chinese employees in Hong Kong. Collectivist employees reported higher satisfaction with their work, pay, promotion, supervision, and coworker than their individualist counterparts. Study 3 replicated findings of Study 2, with a sample of employees at a lower rank.