Chapter 14 - The Role of Individual Differences in Group and Team Creativity

Abstract

Teamwork has been a growing feature of modern organizations, and much of today’s innovation occurs in the context of collaborative teams. In this chapter we discuss the various factors that may influence group creativity and offer suggestions to achieve creative synergy in organizational teams. We review the literature on individual differences in creativity and the research on group composition for collaborative creativity. We discuss the factors that will influence the degree of impact individual differences and the personality factors and cognitive orientations that influence group processes and group creativity. We highlight a number of ways in which the effects of individual differences may not be simply additive within groups and that ideal group composition may vary for different phases of the creative process. We propose a contingence/configural model to predict the effects of group composition on creativity.