Diverse teams may potentiate greater creativity through divergent thinking. Yet research suggests these teams face a dilemma: the very features that make them promising are associated with persistent communication challenges that threaten their effectiveness. We turn to the literature on dialectical tensions to argue that a process of oscillation, consisting of repeated alternation between moments of divergence, emphasizing the differentiation of perspectives, and moments of convergence, emphasizing integrating ideas to produce coordination, may mobilize the tension between differentiation and integration effectively. We explore the utility of our framework by applying it to the experiences of a diverse cohort of researchers who engaged in a purposefully designed oscillatory process to generate research projects related to climate resilience. Our multimethod evaluation of this case indicates that oscillation was effective for creative idea generation. This work contributes to both practice and scholarship in interdisciplinary teamwork support, creativity, and organizations.
Current studies of diversity in teams and organizations highlight the importance of examining activated, rather than just dormant, differences on a team. In this study, we contribute to organizational diversity theories by arguing that the activation of differences is a communicative process whereby how teams talk about their differences matters in how the activated differences affect team outcomes. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of real-life scientific teams, we examine the relationship between how team members activate and frame differences and how those communicative frames affect the team’s collective work. We find that how teams frame their differences affects the relationship between activated differences and team outcomes. We give practical and theoretical recommendations for the communicative management of differences on teams and in organizations.
Communicating complex information about environmental health risks in a single message is impossible. Thus, message designers hope that risk messages encourage people to think more about the message and risks, look for more information, and ultimately make behavior changes. The presentation of information about environmental risks using threat appeals is a common message design strategy thought to increase message engagement and influence attitudes, information seeking, and risk reduction behaviors. We compared lower threat messages, which did not include explicit statements about susceptibility and severity of a risk, to higher threat messages, which did. We combined predictions from the extended parallel process model with dual‐process theories of persuasion to examine whether people respond to these types of messages differently. In an online experiment, participants (N = 892) were randomly assigned to a message condition (higher or lower threat) and topic condition (arsenic, bisphenol A, or volatile organic compounds). Overall, participants exposed to higher threat messages (regardless of risk topic) reported experiencing higher levels of fear. Higher levels of fear were associated with more positive thoughts about the message (in alignment with the message advocacy) and fewer negative thoughts about the message (against the message advocacy), both of which influenced message attitudes. Finally, message attitudes were associated with increased information seeking and intentions to engage in risk reduction behaviors.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.