The Creative and Cross-Functional Benefits of Wearing Hearts on Sleeves: Authentic Affect Climate, Information Elaboration, and Team Creativity

Abstract

Team creative processes of generating and elaborating ideas tend to be laden with emotional expressions and communication. Yet, there is a noticeable lack of theory on how differences in teams’ management and support of affect expressions influence their ability to produce creative outcomes. We investigate why and when team authentic affect climates, which encourage members to share and respond to authentic affect, generate greater creativity compared with more constrained affect climates where members suppress or hide their genuine feelings. We propose that authentic affect climate enhances team creativity through greater information elaboration by the team and that these informational and creative benefits are more likely in functionally diverse teams. Results from three complementary studies—one multisource field study of management teams and two experiments—provide support for our predictions. In our experiments, we also examine the theorized affective mechanisms and find that authentic affect climate increases information elaboration and creativity through members’ affect expressions (Study 2) and empathic responses to each other’s expressed affect (Studies 2 and 3). We discuss the implications of our findings for the team creativity, diversity, and affect literatures.