Team Creativity, Cognition, and Cognitive Style Diversity

Abstract

In spite of the recognized importance of team creativity for organizational success, the factors that influence it are not well understood. In this paper, we address an important gap in the literature on the impact of team diversity on team creativity. We show how team cognitive diversity both enhances and inhibits team cognition, or the manner in which information is organized and distributed within the team. We further demonstrate that team cognition is a key mechanism through which cognitive diversity influences team creativity. The paper introduces a new theoretical lens, the signal-detection perspective, which argues that cognitive diversity amplifies the signals to the location of critical cognitive resources within the team and aids in their detection, consequently enhancing the form of team cognition that is central to team creativity. We test the predictions in a longitudinal study with 112 MBA student project teams. This research advances our understanding of what makes teams creative by synthesizing and testing existing theory as well as providing a new perspective that highlights an alternative way in which a team’s cognitive inputs impact team creativity. This paper was accepted by Sendil Ethiraj, organizations.

Team experiential cognitive style and team performance: The moderating impact of workplace setting

“…Our findings enrich our theoretical understanding of the performance implications of cognitive team characteristics in two ways. Prior research (e.g., Aggarwal & Woolley, ; Armstrong et al, ; DeChurch & Mesmer‐Magnus, ; Edwards et al, ; Lim & Klein, ; Norris & Epstein, ; Zhang et al, ) on team cognition in general, and on cognitive styles in particular, has not paid a lot of attention to environmental factors. Instead, using experimental designs, scholars have tried to keep the context as constant or neutral as possible to avoid confounding effects.…”

“…Second, we show the relevance of resource‐matching theory to theorize on the moderating effect of the physical workplace on the relationship between cognitive team characteristics and team performance. Prior research (e.g., Aggarwal & Woolley, ; Norris & Epstein, ) on the relationship between team cognitive styles and performance has relied heavily on the well‐established dual process theory. While this theory is valuable and important to theorize the direct effect of cognitive styles on team performance as well as to make arguments about the interaction between different cognitive styles, it does not really provide concepts and mechanisms to highlight the potential moderating effect of contextual factors.…”

“…Team cognition, the manner in which knowledge important to team functioning is mentally organized, represented and distributed within the team, has been found to strongly influence behavioural and motivational team processes and team performance (e.g., Austin, ; DeChurch & Mesmer‐Magnus, ; Kozlowski & Ilgen, ; Mesmer‐Magnus et al, ). Researchers have explored two particular aspects of team cognition: shared mental models—i.e., the common knowledge of team members—and transactive memory—i.e., the complementary knowledge of team members (Aggarwal & Woolley, ; DeChurch & Mesmer‐Magnus, ). Both aspects have been found to be of importance to team performance (DeChurch & Mesmer‐Magnus, ; Mesmer‐Magnus et al, ).…”

“…Some scholars have further enriched our understanding of the team performance implications of team cognitive styles by considering particular mediators. Aggarwal and Woolley (), for instance, found a mediating role of transactive memory in the relationship between team cognitive style diversity and team creativity.…”

“…Previous research indeed found a direct impact of cognitive styles on team creativity (Norris & Epstein, ). Researchers also found some evidence that the relationship between cognitive styles and team creativity is mediated by team cognition (Aggarwal & Woolley, ). However, not much is known about the context in which cognitive styles may lead to team creativity, while probably the context is an important moderator (Maloney, Bresman, Zellmer‐Bruhn, & Beaver, ).…”