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.

The group accountability literature over the past two decades is reviewed in this article. Results are organized according to the theoretical accountability framework proposed by London, Smither, and Adsit (1997). The reviewed literature suggests that group accountability is more dynamic than current conceptualizations allow, and that the priority of accountability demands shifts over time. Building on these insights, the authors extend London et al.’s model to accommodate group accountability as a dynamic interpersonal process. Specifically, they propose that group accountability is an emergent state that derives from group interactions as well as from external sources of accountability expectations. In this extended model, both the person within the group who is held accountable as well as other group members play key roles in transforming individual accountability up to the group level. Based on the combined results of the empirical review and expanded conceptual model, the authors identify directions for studies of group accountability.

This paper reports on a qualitative study of how 12 work teams and a project-management team spanned their boundaries in a large engineering project. The study identified two types of boundary-spanning activities. Project-level managers carried out receptive activities in which they spanned boundaries vertically, adapted their management practices, and attuned themselves to the teams. Team-level managers’ activities, on the other hand, were reactive: they spanned boundaries vertically and horizontally when they needed to, and made informal connections to peer teams and project-level management. These findings underscore the important role of team boundary-spanning activities in the shape of subsequent inter-team interactions.

No abstract

No abstract