Creativity and Innovation in Organizational Teams

Leigh L. Thompson, Hoon- Seok Choi, Leigh L. Thompson, Hoon- Seok Choi

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781135612375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Creativity and Innovation in Organizational Teams stemmed from a conference held at the Kellogg School of Management in June 2003 covering creativity and innovation in groups and organizations. Each chapter of the book is written by an expert and covers original theory about creative processes in organizations. The organization of the text reflects a longstanding notion that creativity in the world of work is a joint outcome of three interdependent forces--individual thinking, group processes, and organizational environment.Part I explores basic cognitive mechanisms that underlie creative thinking, and includes chapters that discuss cognitive foundations of creativity, a cognitive network model of creativity that explains how and why creative solutions form in the human mind, and imports a ground-breaking concept of "creativity templates" to the study of creative idea generation in negotiation context. The second part is devoted to understanding how groups and teams in organizational settings produce creative ideas and implement innovations. Finally, Part III contains three chapters that discuss the role of social, organizational context in which creative endeavors take place.The book has a strong international mix of scholarship and includes clear business implications based on scientific research. It weds the disciplines of psychology, cognition, and business theory into one text.

Part I: COGNITIVE PROCESSES OF CREATIVE THINKING

Chapter 1: Empirical Studies of Creative Cognition in Idea Generation

Steven M. Smith
David R. Gerkens
Texas A&M University

Jami J. Shah
Noe Vargas-Hernandez
Arizona State University

Creativity and innovation are seen as critically important in many applied domains of endeavor, such as business, science, engineering, and the arts. However, creativity is difficult to define, and creative products are not universally judged as such by all experts. Moreover, a consensual blueprint or formula for producing creative products does not exist, nor is a deterministic method for producing creative products likely to emerge in the near future. Worse yet, creativity is different for different people—it varies from one domain to another, from one society to another, and from one historical period to another. In short, creativity is something we desperately need, but we do not know how to get it, and we are not really sure what it is. How can one possibly find anything universal to say about this slippery subject?

There are many approaches to understanding creativity, there are many methods for researching creativity, and there are many aspects of creativity that are studied. For example, the historiometric approach examines historical trends in creative innovation, whereas a personality approach tries to find the traits that give a person a creative disposition. Research methods for studying creativity range from psychometric methods to pop psychology and economic analyses. Aspects of creativity include attitudes about creativity, group creativity techniques, and product development. Thus, there is tremendous variation in what people have said and studied about creativity.

One constancy about creativity, however, is that it always involves people, specifically, ideas, products of the intellect. Creative products do not simply happen; they are generated by human minds. Thus, one universal about all creative products is that they emerge from the minds of people. This constancy, the centrality of the human mind to all creative activities in any context, has guided our own research in creativity. The study of the mind is referred to as cognitive psychology, so our approach to studying creativity is called the creative cognition approach (e.g., Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward, & Finke, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999). At the heart of the creative cognition approach is the notion that creative ideas are products of the mind; as such, they are subject to the same principles and mechanisms that are involved in all aspects of cognition.

Because creative cognition, like noncreative cognition, involves causal mechanisms, the experimental method is usually used in research so that inferences about cause and effect can be drawn from analyses of the results. Case studies, surveys, questionnaires, and correlational studies can provide descriptive and even predictive relationships among variables, but only the experimental method can logically address issues of cause and effect. Causal relationships must be known to understand the processes in the mind that produce creative ideas. Only when we understand the cognitive processes that produce creative ideas will we know how to train people to think more creatively. Furthermore, an understanding of the roles of cognitive mechanisms in creative thinking can also clarify how to maximize the benefits of groups or teams of people, as well as what limitations can prevent optimal progress in creative groups.

Although the artificial nature of laboratory conditions makes it possible to control many factors, the down side of experimental laboratory research can be a lack of ecological validity. That is, because laboratories are so careful to control extraneous factors, the resultant conditions may be quite artificial, unlike any real-world situation one might ever encounter. Of course the down side of more naturalistic field studies of creative thinking is that such studies are typically slow and expensive in terms of human capital, numerous real-world factors routinely interact, and control of extraneous factors is more difficult. Our approach to this issue has been alignment of methods—a plan that takes advantage of a combination of both field research and laboratory studies of creativity. The idea of aligning research methods across levels of complexity is to conduct a small set of parallel experiments in both naturalistic and laboratory settings, manipulating similar factors, and measuring similar dependent measures. If the results of the experiments done at different levels of complexity show the same findings, then one may have more confidence that results of subsequent laboratory studies will likewise generalize to more ecologically valid situations.

In this chapter, we discuss research related to a number of cognitive components of creativity, and we relate those cognitive mechanisms to various components of group idea-generation techniques. Using incubation effects as an example, we then discuss research that aligns questions tested in simple laboratory tasks with questions posed in more realistic idea generation settings. Given that research methods align, we identify future directions for similar research questions.

CREATIVE COGNITION

The underlying premises of the creative cognition approach are twofold: The production of creative ideas can be described in terms of the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to those ideas, and cognition has inherently creative aspects. The first premise—that creativity depends on the workings of the mind—offers a different focus than do other approaches, such as the psychometric approach, which looks at common patterns of behavior among individuals; the case study approach, which examines in depth the experiences of highly creative individuals; or pragmatic approaches, which focus on methods for producing creative products. Each of these approaches to the study of creativity brings several insights and advantages for understanding various aspects of creativity. The psychometric approach, probably the most common in psychological studies of creativity, studies abilities and cognitive styles that distinguish creative people from noncreative ones. One important insight of this approach is that it treats creativity as a multidimensional set of abilities, rather than endorsing the notion of a single creative ability or process. A limitation of this approach, however, is that the individual differences that are observed are correlational measures, rather than experimentally controlled variables. Therefore, questions concerned with cause and effect in creative thinking cannot be adequately addressed, as they can in the creative cognition approach, which is experimentally oriented. Case studies are particularly valuable because of their ecological validity, representing, as they do, cases of recognized creative achievement. Causes of the creative products, inventions, and discoveries, however, cannot be known from case studies because such cases are inherently rich in terms of the number of factors that come into play in these creative achievements. Pragmatic approaches to creativity, such as the “creative templates” approach (Goldenberg, Nir, & Maoz, chap. 3, this volume), focus not on psychological issues, but on methods for creating valuable new products independently of the creators. That is, independently of the creator’s personality, abilities, or emotional states, a novel and valuable product can be generated if the pragmatic approach is followed. Clearly, a creative cognition approach focuses on psychological states and processes, rather than on the final product. Although practical templates can be used to guide people to many creative products, it is also clear that much creativity has arisen in the absence of such pragmatic approaches, and that most creativity has resulted from human minds. Furthermore, the personal consequences of creative thinking, such as intrinsic rewards, motivational consequences, or flow states, cannot be investigated with such pragmatic approaches.

Although we focus on the first of these two premises in the present chapter, the second one is worth mentioning as well. Classic conceptions of the mind see cognition as passive, and reacting to stimuli encountered in the environment, reliably playing back sequences of past experiences when memories are retrieved. It is now clear, however, that much cognition is constructive, generative, and productive. This more generative view of cognition applies to perception, comprehension of language, memory, mental imagery, and the use of concepts and mental categories. For example, the simple fact that one’s perception of reversible figures such as a Necker Cube can be switched from one interpretation to another without any change in the actual figure shows that perception of objects involves active generative processes and cannot be explained with simple passive perceptual processes. Likewise, the fact that ambiguous sentences (e.g., Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas) can have multiple meanings indicates that comprehension requires the active participation of the listener. The existence of false memories shows that memories of the past cannot be passively replayed, but rather they must be actively generated. This active generation, in which perceptions, memories, and comprehension are created from inferences and bits of knowledge, is necessary for nearly every aspect of cognition.

The creative cognition approach seeks to understand creativity with the methods and concepts of cognitive science. No one cognitive process can be identified as the creative process. Rather, creative thinking includes particular combinations of the same cognitive processes involved in noncreative activities. The creative cognition approach has its origins in the associationist tradition, which focused on the learning of multiple-stage problems; in Gestalt psychology, which emphasized insight as a holistic phenomenon similar to perception; and computational modeling, which tried to capture the operations and informational states involved in complex thinking. The associationist tradition bought into a simple work ethic in which work is compensated with products and success. The associationist work ethic can be seen in contemporary researchers who believe that creative ideas are generated in discrete increments. The Gestalt perspective, however, differed from that of the associationists. In particular, Gestalters focused on the importance of insight—a special process involved in creative thinking that involves rapid restructuring and its role in creative discovery.

The creative cognition approach to understanding creativity assumes that the same cognitive structures and processes involved in noncreative cognition can explain creative thinking as well. This approach might be interpreted as stating that creative thinking is not an ordinary activity and that noncreative cognition is well understood. Of course neither supposition is accurate. Creative thinking clearly involves many aspects of ordinary cognition, and much noncreative thinking remains to be understood. Creative cognition supports our understanding of both creativity and human cognition.

Ideally, the creative cognition approach informs us about ways of optimizing creativity. A personality approach can tell us how to identify which people are more creative, but does not inform us much about the process of creative thinking. The creative cognition approach, in contrast, concentrates on the cognitive processes that enable creativity. Once these processes are understood, it will extend and refine our ability to apply those processes to more real-world activities. Whereas a personality approach has little to say about how to train creative thinking, the creative cognition approach does focus on processes that can be affected by training.

A number of cognitive processes and operations are relevant to creative thinking, including memory mechanisms such as those involved in memory blocking and recovery, as well as false or created memories. Cognitive processes and knowledge structures involved in concepts and categorization, and those involved in analogy and mental models, provide the basis for creative thought in a variety of imaginative tasks. The roles of verbal and nonverbal modalities, such as mental imagery, are often intrinsically important to the exploration of creative ideas. In addition, higher order processes, such as those involved in reasoning and metacognition, are crucial for creative cognition.

COGNITIVE COMPONENTS OF CREATIVITY

Although a complete treatment of creative cognition is beyond the scope of the present chapter, we briefly review some of the key cognitive mechanisms and structures that underlie creative thinking. An understanding of these components of creative cognition is necessary for understanding creative thinking as a system of mechanisms and structures, just as the functioning of an organism, a weather system, or a vehicle might be better grasped if its components are understood. The interested reader can find more thorough coverage of creative cognition elsewhere (e.g., Finke, Ward, & Smith, 1992; Smith, 1995a; Smith, Ward, & Finke, 1995; Ward, Smith, & Finke, 1999; Ward, Smith, & Vaid, 1997).

Memory Mechanisms

There are many memory mechanisms that play important roles in creative cognition, including working-memory capacity, interference or blocking, recovered memories, created memories, and cryptomnesia or unconscious plagiarism. Working memory refers to the temporary storage area in which conscious thought operates—often referred to as short-term memory. This type of memory has a limited capacity, and it is the capacity of working memory that varies as a function of factors such as age, personality, and intellectual ability. For example, a better working-memory capacity may better enable an individual’s ability to consider multiple concepts all at once, an essential step in many creative thinking exercises. For example, in brainstorming, it may be useful to supply participants with note-taking materials to augment their limited working-memory capacities; otherwise they may forget their ideas before they get a turn to voice the ideas in the brainstorming session. Memory interference, also known as memory blocking, is a mechanism that prevents memories from successfully entering consciousness as a function of retrieval failure. Memory blocking and fixation in creative problem solving have been attributed to the same underlying cognitive mechanism (e.g., Dodds, & Smith, 1999; Smith, 1994, 1995b; Smith & Blankenship, 1989, 1991). For example, creative ideas may be displaced by interference from other ideas that are noncreative, but that are more recent or more frequently encountered than are the creative ideas. Memories that are blocked from conscious awareness can be recovered, and the mechanism for memory recovery has been studied as the same as that which causes incubation and insight in creative problem solving (e.g., Dodds, Ward, & Smith, 2004; Smith, 1994, 1995a; Smith & Dodds, 1999; Smith & Vela, 1991). So, for example, the same cognitive mechanisms that unexpectedly resolve one’s tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) experiences may also underlie the sudden insights that resolve impasses in one’s creative thinking. Created memories, sometimes referred to as false memories, arise from the same mechanisms that lead to creative idea generation; both are composed of material drawn from a combination of past experiences plus factual or conceptual knowledge, all cobbled together according to a schema or related knowledge structure (e.g., Smith et al., 2000). For example, you might falsely recall that you ate fried chicken 3 months ago on Sunday if that meal fits your schema for your Sunday dinner, and/or if you had fried chicken recently and misremembered it as having happened on a different occasion. Similarly, your creative imagination might produce ide...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Foreword
• Lea’s Organization and Management Series
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Cognitive Processes of Creative Thinking
• Part II: Team and Group Dynamics of Brainstorming
• Part III: Organizational Influences of Creativity and Innovation