Taking Time to Incubate: The Moderating Role of ‘What You Do’ and ‘When You Do It’ on Creative Performance

We explore how the choices available to individuals planning multi‐task work can facilitate the incubation of ideas and enhance creative performance. Using opportunistic assimilation theory, we hypothesize that two considerations can determine the effectiveness of incubation and creative performance. First, we argue that having the discretion to switch tasks when needed, as well as the timing of this discretionary switch between tasks (i.e., earlier versus later in the work process on the main task) is important. Second, the scope of the intervening task (i.e., in the same knowledge domain as the main task versus in a different domain) can lead to more effective incubation and creativity. Results of a laboratory study indicate that participants who made a discretionary switch to an intervening task later in their work process on the main task benefited significantly more in terms of creative performance than those who chose to switch earlier in their work process or chose not to switch tasks. Additionally, participants who worked on an in‐domain intervening task exhibited significantly higher creativity on the main task than those who worked on an out‐of‐domain intervening task. Furthermore, focus of attention on the main task partially mediated these results.     

Effects of social-psychological factors on creative performance: the role of informational and controlling expected evaluation and modeling experience

The impact of two social-psychological factors, expected evaluation and modeling, on creativity was investigated in a laboratory study. The controlling and informational aspects of expected evaluation were manipulated and individuals were provided no example, a standard example, or a creative example of a solution to a representative management problem. As expected, individuals had significantly higher creativity and intrinsic motivation when anticipating an informational rather than a controlling evaluation. In addition, individuals given a creative example had higher creative performance than those given no example. The lowest levels of intrinsic motivation and creativity were found when expected evaluation was of a controlling nature and a standard model was given. Additionally, we tested and found support for Cognitive Evaluation Theory's primary intervening cognitive process of locus of causality mediating the relationship between evaluation and intrinsic motivation. Intrinsic motivation was not found to mediate the relationship between evaluation and creativity, and possible explanations for this result are discussed.     

Task context changes: teams’ maladaptive responses to unanticipated change

Understanding how teams are affected by and adapt to unexpected change is critical to maximizing team effectiveness. We explore the perspective that rather than being adaptive, how teams experience relativistic adjustments in pacing can actually undermine team creative processes and performance. We test our hypotheses in two experimental studies. Study 1 considers how teams experience change in the time available to complete the task, while Study 2 employs a change in workload. Results support that the deviating patterns of task pacing exhibited by teams responding to an unexpected exogenous change undermines effective team creative processes, leading to lower levels of creative performance. In addition, their effects differ by when the change occurs in the teams’ work process (i.e., earlier, midpoint, or later).     

Building blocks of idea generation and implementation in teams: A meta-analysis of team design and team creativity and innovation

Although organizations increasingly rely on teams to innovate, little systematic knowledge exists about how to design teams to do so. Building on the model of collaborative creativity and innovation and synthesizing findings from published and unpublished studies, this meta-analysis examines the role of team design on team creativity and innovation. We used random-effects meta-analysis to cumulate the correlations between different features of team design and team creativity or team innovation from 134 field studies representing 11,353 teams and 35 studies representing 2,485 student teams. We found that team tenure is curvilinearly related, autonomy-supportive leadership, task interdependence, and goal interdependence are positively related, and demographic diversity and team size are unrelated to team creativity and innovation. Examining meta-analytic path models, we found that task interdependence and supportive leadership positively relate to team creativity and innovation via team collaboration and team potency. In accounting for the literature, we found a dearth of studies examining team processes, some types of diversity such as racial diversity, and the role of team member turnover. We conclude by providing directions for future research and practical guidance about increasing team creativity and innovation through team design.