The impact of task context on team cognition and creative performance

Abstract

In this study, we investigated both the role of task context (i.e., task type and task sequence) in influencing the strength of specialization and coordination in teams, and how it impacts the relative value of specialization and coordination for team outcomes (i.e., team creative performance). In an experimental setting, we predicted and found that working on an initial creative task facilitated the emergence of specialization and coordination in the team, as compared to working on an initial analytic task. Furthermore, the sequence in which the different task types were presented influenced subsequent coordination levels. Additionally, specialization and coordination had an interactive effect on team creative performance. We found that specialization was most beneficial for team creative performance when coordination was low rather than high, and that coordination was most beneficial for team creative performance when specialization was low rather than high, hence they play a compensatory role in influencing team creativity. Overall, this advances our existing understanding of team creativity by studying the influence of an important but understudied factor (i.e., the task context) and associated team cognitive states. The implications of our results for theory and practice are discussed.