The Literature Review On Group Creativity

The Research Article has taken multiple papers from historical or empirical data and has compiled that with some primary sources to come up with conclusions. The Research has taken nearly 4 papers as the historical data. These papers involve:

The paper by Stan examines the effects of group structure and evaluation pressure on group creativity and the author's investigation of 32 teams working on an idea generation task offers support for the notion that teams working under an imposed, functional structure create higher quality results than teams that work under an emergent structure.

The next paper taken was by Majchrzak, Birnbaum-More, and Johnson which presented a qualitative longitudinal study of 31 creative teams and the authors investigated two practices that these teams used to manage their creative process: maintaining engagement and co-creating shared boundary objects. With the study coming to the conclusion that these practices affected the assessment of the teams' innovativeness.

The next paper taken was by Kempe, Horton, Buchholz, and Görs, "An Optimal Algorithm for Raw Idea Selection under Uncertainty" which addresses the challenge of selecting the initial ideas for further development from a large set of raw ideas and The authors proposed a ranking algorithm based on pair wise comparisons to be made by knowledgeable decision makers which showed that its use will reduce uncertainty and effectively involve expert knowledge in the idea selection process.

The next paper taken was by "A Collaborative Algorithm for Computer-Supported Idea Selection in the Front End of Innovation" .In this paper, another selection algorithm is proposed based on a method used in computer-based sorting which showed that the proposed algorithm compares favorably with individual and group methods.

The last paper was “Cross-Level Influence of Team Characteristics on Individual Idea Generation in Technology-Supported Teams", by Srinivasan, Maruping, and Robert investigates the use of technology to support idea generation in groups individual idea generation performance which showed that individual goal striving is a stronger predictor of individual idea generation performance in dispersed team contexts compared to co-located team contexts and in larger teams than in smaller teams..

Findings

The literature on group creativity reviewed has shown that the use of challenging goals, structured group interaction, autonomy, and a supportive environment were among some of the factors that seem to facilitate creativity and innovation in groups. It was also shown that techniques that assure efficient interaction, appropriate leadership, and motivating goals may help groups overcome some of the negative forces. Motivational techniques such as goal setting and increasing accountability helped improve performance for both interactive and nominal group. Group sessions should be followed by an opportunity for solitary reflection before decisions are made. It is usually presumed that generating a large number of ideas will enable groups to make better decisions or to come up with better quality solutions. Organized procedures for evaluation and voting may be required to efficiently determine the best option.

Discussion and outcome of study

Providing employees with tools to think creatively has been proven to increase innovation in organizations in the research article. Research helped show that organizations which have established skill-bases and tools for creativity outperform the competition in terms of revenue, rolling out new products, innovation and growth. Consequently, it is important that creativity in teams be given a central place in organizational research. Based on the findings, we can learn that team members should engage in the co-creation of boundary objects early in the life of the team and that members need to maintain their engagement with a team.