Final Report Summary - TEAM INNOVATION (Developing Innovative Capabilities in Teams)
In organizations across industries, creative and innovative tasks such as problem solving and product design frequently occur in teams. Yet teams often fail to realize their creativity potential, in part because doing so requires them to use multiple, often inconsistent, perspective, goals, processes and outcomes. To be creative, teams must be novel and useful, diverse and cohesive, generative and evaluative, as well as passionate and disciplined. Teams must promote personal initiatives while coalescing around a shared vision, and encourage members to break the rules, while also adhering to boundaries and constraints. This project examines conditions, mechanisms and processes that enable teams to benefit from competing demands. In several related studies I examine: (1) the effect of a paradoxical frame - a frame that fosters the recognition and embracement of contradictions - on team creativity, (2) the ability of teams to create while adhering to cost and time constraints and (3) the effect of different managerial approaches for managing contradictory goals and task demands. The research findings suggest that adopting a shared paradoxical frame improves teams’ ability to develop creative products that are both original and feasible relative to other frames. Moreover, a paradoxical frame improved the ability to develop creative products while adhering to time and cost constraints. A study comparing different managerial approaches for managing contradictory goals and task demands revealed that simultaneously focusing on two competing goals is more beneficial for creativity than sequentially shifting between goals. Simultaneous focus on opposing goals enables synergies and the changing pf emphasis on each goal in response to different situational and task changes.