Team Leaders as Cognition Orchestrators - Improving Creativity by Reducing Cognitive Biases

Abstract

This paper articulates an idea of team leaders as cognition orchestrators – those who orchestrate and facilitate multicultural teams’ interactions during the creative process – as a novel approach to understanding how multicultural team leaders leverage teams’ diverse cognition-based resources to enhance creative performance. I theorize that team leaders can create and maintain a team climate – a social fabric facilitating effective knowledge generation – to foster the creative performance of culturally diverse teams through mitigating members’ cognitive biases. I identify seven types of cognitive biases relevant to team creativity, namely projection bias, egocentric empathy gap, focusing illusion, confirmation bias, endowment effect, and authority bias (or the rule “respect and obey others”). This paper further puts forward a set of propositions to address these biases towards improving team creative performance. Through this paper, while responding to the call for more research on the positive side of cultural diversity, I shed more light on leaders as agents of changes in team processes through mitigating cognition biases. Crossing the management discipline, this work is also the first attempt to introduce a design-driven approach (using a non-human actor for interaction and communication) towards resolving the intercultural encounters in multicultural teams.