Pursuing Nascent Ideas in Circus Groups: The Role of Interaction Dynamics and Shared Emotions

Abstract

The ideas creators pursue determine the trajectory of creative endeavors and have implications for creative success. At the outset, groups have to converge around and develop some initial ideas they deem promising. Previous work has concentrated on creative evaluation in groups and organizations to understand how promising ideas are identified and adopted, but two issues makes it difficult to apply them in explaining why creators pursue particular nascent ideas. First, most research focus on external evaluators such as managers to explain how gatekeepers validate and select relatively developed ideas but cannot tell us how creators themselves developed particular ideas in the first place. Second, most studies adopt logical, verbal approaches to evaluation that are not suited to understanding why groups pursue nascent ideas given that such ideas are often difficult to articulate. In a qualitative study of circus artists creating new works, I found that nascent ideas gained or lost momentum through elaborative play – a process of transforming ideas guided by interaction dynamics and shared emotions. Groups experienced and communicated shared enthusiasm as they engaged with ideas and were able to build on ideas without explicating their rationales. When groups experienced little shared positive emotion or were not able to build upon an idea in an on-going way, the idea lost momentum and was dropped. These findings challenge the view of creative evaluation as a primarily verbal and cognitive process, highlight the importance of group engagement in the ideation phase, and furthers our understanding of the nature of creative ideas.