Scenario-Based Management of Team Creativity in Sensitivity Contexts: An Approach with a General Bayesian Network

Abstract

Recent trends in the market, such as worldwide competition and rapid consumer behavior changes, have stressed the importance of team creativity more than ever. The reasons are that team creativity is influencing corporate performance in a decisive manner and improving it significantly is at the heart of most strategies. Accordingly, organizations have focused on increasing their responsiveness and ability to foster creativity and innovation. They are concerned not only with fostering creativity and innovation among individual employees, but also with developing creative and innovative teams. However, when it comes to enhancing the level of team creativity, decision makers are embarrassed and even intimidated by the huge number of relevant factors waiting to be analyzed and the degree of complexities of causal relationships existing among them. Furthermore, very few studies in the literature have tackled this research issue. This research proposes useful management methods for improving team creativity by performing a variety of scenario-based sensitivity analyses based on a General Bayesian Network (GBN). More specifically, this study proposes a GBN-driven approach to effectively managing team creativity, in which five variables—exploration, exploitation, knowledge sharing, expertise heterogeneity, and organizational learning culture—are handled in the context of causal relationships with team creativity. For the empirical test, we collected 211 questionnaires from 43 teams and applied the GBN to the survey data to extract a set of reliable causal relationships. By performing scenario-based simulations, both what-if and goal-seeking simulations, we found that the team creativity can be managed very effectively by adjusting the related variables in a way that maximizes team creativity.