The document discusses teams and creativity. It defines a team as having complementary skills, a common purpose, shared goals and mutual accountability. Key inputs to creative teams include size, longevity, task type, member skills and diversity. Brainstorming is a common technique, but it can reduce ideas due to social factors. Other techniques like nominal groups address some brainstorming weaknesses. Effective teams require trust, managing conflict, and cohesiveness to achieve outcomes.

1. Managing Change,
Creativity &
innovation
© Patrick Dawson, Constantine
Andriopoulos

2. The Group: Nurturing Teamwork
Chapter 12

3. Lecture objectives
1. Appreciate the importance of the team in today’s complex
working environments.
2. Understand the differences between a group and a team.
3. Examine team-building interventions during change.
4. Explain the variables related to creative team inputs,
processes, and outcomes as well as the moderating factors
that may affect team performance.
5. Understand the value of brainstorming and its influence on
the generation of ideas.
6. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of three different
team problem-solving techniques, and to consider the
suitability of these techniques for different problem-solving
situations.

4. Why is collaboration important?
• Our society is complex and technologically sophisticated.
• Timely information is the most important commodity.

5. What is a group? How is it different
from a team?
• A group is defined as two or more individuals, interacting and
interdependent, who work together to achieve particular
objectives.
• Formal
• Informal

6. What is a group? How is it different
from a team?
• Katzenbach and Smith (1999) define a team as
a small number of people with complementary skills who are
committed to a common purpose, performance goals and
approach for which they hold themselves mutually
accountable.

7. Why do people join teams?
(Robbins et al. 1994)
• Security
• Self-esteem
• Power
• Goal achievement

8. The Team Development Process
(Tuckman and Jensen 1977)
• Forming
• Storming
• Norming
• Performing
• Adjourning

9. Why do teams fail?
• Hidden Agendas
• Lack of understanding
• Lack of leadership
• Wrong mix of team members
• Unhealthy team environment
• Treat a team like a group

10. Blind conformity
People tend to even engage in illogical or bizarre behavior in
order to guarantee acceptance by a group

11. Asch’s experiment
Does a person have the freedom to act independently? (6:1)
X A B C

12. Groupthink
• Identify the reasons that forced these committees to make
bad decisions
• Groupthink is defined by Janis (1972) as: ‘the psychological
drive for consensus at any cost that suppresses dissent and
appraisal of alternatives in cohesive decision-making groups’.

13. Preventing groupthink (Janis, 1972)
1. Voice their opinions or express their concerns
2. Prepare and anticipate criticism
3. Get recommendations from different groups
4. Periodically divide the group
5. Invite outsiders
6. Play the ‘devil’s advocate’ role
7. Reconsider the action plan

14. Social loafing
• ‘the tendency for people in a group to slack off’
Thompson (2003)
Causes
• Equity of effort
• Loss of personal accountability
• Motivational loss due to the sharing of rewards
• Co-ordination loss as more people perform the task

15. Team-building interventions during
change
1. Confrontation meetings
2. Responsibility charting
3. Appreciative inquiry

16. Creative teams: What do we know?

17. Team size
• The output of creative ideas on a per-employee basis
decreased as team size increased (Bouchard and Hare, 1970;
Renzulli et al. 1974)
• Creative Production Percent (CPP) improves with a decrease
in team size until it reaches the group size of two, or dyads
Why does this happen?
• The dyads experience a unique and exclusive one-to-one
capability to share and exchange ideas
• superior when project teams are required to break away from
the usual or functional intellectual set

18. Team longevity
• Interpersonal interaction as the primary means of gathering
and collecting information or ideas (Hargadon and Sutton,
1997, 2000)
• A lot of processes, ideas or products/services are still
complicated
• The longer groups have been in existence, the less
innovative they become (Katz, 1982)

19. Reasons
• Tended to be staffed by older employees
• Members tended to interact significantly less among
themselves

20. Task
• Creative work can occur at any occupation, where the task at
hand involves complex, ill-defined problems, where the result
requires the generation of novel and useful ideas (Mumford
and Gustafson, 1988)
• It requires teamwork and the integration of specialized
capabilities

21. Knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)
• Individuals must be competent and they must possess the
necessary KSAs
• Without “input” there can be no “output”
• People who generate innovative ideas need to know the basic
knowledge of their fields
• It is important to consider the different KSAs that their team
members are bringing into the project

22. Resourcing the team
• Everything that the organization has to assist their employees’
work
• Funds, material resources, systems and processes (Amabile
and Gryskiewicz, 1989)
• The lack of project resources can constrain employees’
creativity

23. Team composition
• Most teams struggle to pull together the right skills, attitudes,
behaviors, and problem-solving styles to achieve adequate
team diversity and cohesiveness
• Milliken and Martins (1996) distinguish between two types of
diversity: 1) observable or readily detectable attributes, 2)Less
visible or underlying attributes

24. Team composition
• Diversity can either enhance or hinder creativity
• Homogeneity among group members is not particularly
facilitative for creative group outcomes

25. Problem-solving
Creative problem solving usually involves
three key stages:
1. Define the problem
2. Generate ideas
3. Decide on the most feasible and valuable solution

26. Brainstorming
• One of the earliest attempts to develop a structured approach
• Generated by Alex Osborn in 1938 (BBDO)
• He came up with some rules designed to improve team
problem-solving
• Osborn labeled these as ‘brainstorming’ as this means using
the brain to storm a problem

27. Rules for successful brainstorming
(Osborn, 1963)
• Criticism of ideas should be abolished
• Welcome ‘free-wheeling’
• Go for large quantities of ideas
• Combination and improvement need to be sought

28. Advantages of brainstorming
• The generation of hundreds of ideas
• Supports the organizational memory
• Improved morale

29. Advantages of brainstorming
• Gain better understanding of each other
• Personal growth
• Relatively inexpensive
• Impressing clients

30. Disadvantages of brainstorming
• The generation of ideas without screening them
• It may not always be the answer to problems

31. Electronic brainstorming
• A new form of computer technology called a Group Support
System (GSS) has emerged in the 1990s
• The principle behind it is that participants contribute their
ideas anonymously to a general pool

32. The five stages of the electronic
brainstorming process
(Gallupe and Cooper, 1993)
1. Generating ideas
2. Editing ideas
3. Evaluating ideas
4. Implementing ideas
5. Action

33. Advantages of electronic brainstorming
• Simultaneous entry of ideas
• Anonymity
• Better ideas are generated
• It can be effective to large teams
• It records the ideas for future sessions

34. Disadvantages of electronic
brainstorming
• It is not a panacea for all problems
• Communication speed
• Overload of ideas
• It is relatively expensive

35. Nominal Group Technique (NGT)
• Participants within this type of team never interact
• Process:
1. It starts with a session of brainwriting where team
members write down their ideas
2. Individuals’ written lists are then shared by the team and
are recorded somewhere where all participants can view
them
3. The team discusses the generated set of ideas for
clarification and evaluation
4. Finally, each person is asked to vote in order to identify
the highest priority ideas or concepts

36. Advantages of the nominal group
technique
• It addresses some of the deficiencies of brainstorming (e.g.
evaluation apprehension)
• It may also be a time-saving technique
• NGT is also very effective in situations when judgment is
important

37. Disadvantages of the Nominal Group
Technique
• It focuses on one issue at a time
• NGT is a structured team problem solving technique
• NGT is not a spontaneous process

38. Interpersonal processes
• Trust (the team is perceived as interpersonally non-
threatening)
• Conflict (several benefits)
• Team cohesiveness

39. Team Outcomes: Does brainstorming work
in practice?
• Nearly all laboratory studies conducted over the last 40
years have discovered that brainstorming sessions lead to
the generation of fewer ideas
1. Evaluation apprehension
2. Social loafing (or free-riding)
3. Production blocking

40. Team outcomes: Does brainstorming
work in practice?
An interesting explanation is given by Sutton and Hargadon
(1996: 688) who argued that participants:
(1) had no past or future task interdependence
(2) had no past or future social relationships
(3) didn’t use the ideas generated
(4) lacked pertinent technical expertise
(5) lacked skills that complement other participants
(6) lacked expertise in doing brainstorming
(7) lacked expertise in leading brainstorming sessions

41. Summary points
• A group can be defined as two or more individuals,
interacting and interdependent, who work together to
achieve particular objectives. The key distinguishing factors
of teams are team members’ complementary skills, their
commitment to a common purpose, performance goals,
and mutual accountability.
• Inputs to a team’s creative process include the size of the
team, resources that are made available, team longevity,
task, KSAs, and team composition.
• The most common creativity-enhancement technique is
brainstorming.

42. References
Amabile, T.M. and Gryskiewicz, S.S. (1989) ‘The creative environment scales: the
work environment inventory’, Creativity Research Journal, 2: 231–54.
Asch, S. (1951) ‘Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of
judgments’, in H. Guetzkow (ed.), Groups, Leadership and Men. New York:
Carnegie Press.
Bouchard, T.J. and Hare, M. (1970) ‘Size, performance and potential in
brainstorming groups’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 54: 51–5.
Carron, A. (1982) ‘Cohesiveness in sport groups: interpretations and
considerations’, Journal of Sport Psychology, 4: 123–38.
Gallupe, R.B. and Cooper, W.H. (1993) ‘Brainstorming electronically’, Sloan
Management Review, 35: 27–36.
Hargadon, A.B. and Sutton, R.I. (1997) ‘Technology brokering and innovation in a
product development firm’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 42: 716–49.
Hargadon, A.B. and Sutton, R.I. (2000) ‘Building the innovation factory’, Harvard
Business Review, 78 (3): 157–66.
Janis, I.L. (1972) Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign Policy
Decisions and Fiascoes, 2nd edn. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Katz, R. and Allen, T.J. (1982) ‘Investigating the not invented here syndrome: a
look at the performance, tenure and communication patterns of 50 R&D
project groups’, R&D Management, 12: 7–19.

43. References
Katzenbach, J.R. and Smith, D.K. (1993) ‘The discipline of teams’, Harvard
Business Review, 83 (7/8) (March–April): 162–71.
Milliken, F. and Martins, L. (1996) ‘Searching for common threads: understanding
the multiple effects of diversity in organizational groups’, Academy of
Management Review, 21: 402–33.
Mumford, M.D. and Gustafson, S.B. (1988) ‘Creative syndrome: integration,
application and innovation’, Psychological Bulletin, 103: 27–43.
Osborn, A. (1963) Applied Imagination, 3rd edn. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons.
Renzulli, J.S., Owen, S.V. and Callahan, C.M. (1974) ‘Fluency, flexibility and
originality as functions of group size’, Journal of Creative Behavior, 8: 107–13.
Robbins, S., Waters-Marsh, T., Cacioppe, R. and Millett, B. (1994) Organisational
Behaviour. Sydney: Prentice Hall of Australia.
Thompson, L. (2003) ‘Improving the creativity of organisational work groups’,
Academy of Management Executive, 17: 96–109.
Tuckman, B.W. and Jensen, M.A.C. (1977) ‘Stages of small group development
revisited’, Group and Organizational Studies, 2: 419–27.