Past success and convergent thinking in groups: The role of group‐focused attributions

Past success often causes groups to think narrowly around strategies that have worked in the past, even when environmental change has rendered these strategies ineffective. From a psychological perspective, this research seems to indicate that past success may give rise to convergent thinking in groups. Why might successful groups be prone to convergent thinking? I argue that the relationship between past success and convergent thinking may depend on the attributions that groups generate to explain their shared success. In this paper, I focus on two distinct attributions at the group level: Individual‐focused attributions that reflect the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual group members and group‐focused attributions that reflect the emergent properties of the group as a whole. I found that group‐focused attributions for past success cause groups to generate fewer ideas that are, on average, more convergent. In contrast, individual‐focused attributions cause groups to generate more ideas that are on average more divergent. These findings suggest that the experience of success may actually stimulate divergent thinking depending on how a group chooses to explain it. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.