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| Project Details |
| Funding Scheme : | General Research Fund | ||||||||||||||||
| Project Number : | 292313 | ||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(English) : | Capitalizing on affect to foster team creativity: The moderating roles of team reflexivity and team identification | ||||||||||||||||
| Project Title(Chinese) : | 如何把情緒轉化為團隊創意的能量: 團隊反思力及團隊身分認同的調節角色 | ||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(English) : | Dr To, March Leung | ||||||||||||||||
| Principal Investigator(Chinese) : | 杜亮博士 | ||||||||||||||||
| Department : | Department of Management | ||||||||||||||||
| Institution : | Hong Kong Baptist University | ||||||||||||||||
| E-mail Address : | marchto@hkbu.edu.hk | ||||||||||||||||
| Tel : | |||||||||||||||||
| Co - Investigator(s) : |
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| Panel : | Business Studies | ||||||||||||||||
| Subject Area : | Business Studies | ||||||||||||||||
| Exercise Year : | 2013 / 14 | ||||||||||||||||
| Fund Approved : | 561,999 | ||||||||||||||||
| Project Status : | Completed | ||||||||||||||||
| Completion Date : | 28-2-2017 | ||||||||||||||||
| Project Objectives : |
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| Abstract as per original application (English/Chinese): |
Teams are critical to an organization’s success, especially in modern day Hong Kong. But teams today must also be creative. Indeed, creativity is recognized as a critical means to create meaningful, lasting value for organizations and their stakeholders in today’s dynamic environment (Zhou & Shalley, 2008). Knowing how to increase and to sustain creativity is a challenge for project leaders and supervisors, and many teams fail to realize their full potential. An important ingredient in team creativity, hitherto under-explored, is emotion. Amabile and her associates (2005) have showed that creative attempts are emotionally charged. Sometimes team members working together feel inspired and experience new and useful insights, but they may also get stuck and feel frustration and even hostility during their interactions. The questions that we address in this research are: What are the emotional processes underlying team creativity? How can team leaders help to translate emotion into energy for team creativity? How can they help team members to work collectively for creative synergy?
Although there is increasing interest in exploring how emotions in teams may serve as assets or liabilities for team creativity, the existing literature is piecemeal and has yielded mixed results. Moreover, neither emotion nor creativity is stable over time. Much of the existing research uses cross-sectional survey designs or one-time experiments which preclude the study of temporal variation in emotions and creativity within teams over time.
We know from our earlier research (To, Fisher, Ashkanasy & Rowe, 2012) that moods account for some of the variation in how creative individuals are from day to day. Like individuals, teams may have good days and bad days in terms of how they feel and how creative they are. The purpose of the research outlined in this proposal is to explore dynamic relationships between collective emotion and team creativity, together with a unique set of boundary conditions hypothesized to condition whether teams turn their emotional energy to creative purposes. We will employ Experience Sampling Methodology and multilevel modeling to study dynamic team processes over time.
In summary, teams are not always at their creative best. Understanding how team creativity varies over time, and the factors affecting these fluctuations, provides a lever for leaders and managers to capitalize on emotion as a resource for improving creative performance. 在隊工中如何充份發揮團隊創意是一個重要的課題。有時候，隊員合作無間，互相啓迪激勵，創意如泉；有時候，合作出現分歧，甚或敵對。創意過程充滿高高低低，也充滿喜怒哀樂。如何能把隊員的情緒轉化為創意的能量，正是這研究項目的主要目的。現存有關情緒和創意的文獻大多零散，其中不乏矛盾的研究結果。我們的目標是探求團隊情緒如何影響隊員的創作力: 在何種情况情感可化作創意之能量；何時情感反成負累? 我們將採用"經驗樣本方法學" 來研究在團隊中情緒和創意的互動。 |
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| Realisation of objectives: | Our first objective was to propose and test an integrative framework regarding the link between group affect and team creativity. This objective has been fully achieved in three aspects together. First, an earlier theoretical paper based on our GRF proposal has been presented in the symposium of “Innovation and Creativity in Teams” at the Academy of Management Conference (Orlando, 2013). The audiences including a few leading scholars in the research area found our work to be interesting, and we received useful feedback from them for our idea development. Second, a conceptual paper (To, M. L., Tse, H. H.M., & Ashkanasy, N. M. 2015. A multilevel model of transformational leadership, affect, and creative processes in work teams. Leadership Quarterly, 26: 543-556) has been published in the Leadership Quarterly. In this paper, we propose an integrative multilevel framework of the links between affect and creativity in teams. A core proposition of our model is to explain how group affect may trigger creative processes in teams, and how leadership behavior may moderate the relationships. This addresses an important, yet understudied, phenomenon at work. Third, a total of three empirical studies have been conducted in order to test the affective influences on team creativity. Please see the details below. Our second objective was to investigate the conditional indirect effects of group affect on team creativity via task elaboration. Based on existing conceptualization and operationalization, we developed and validated a scale of task elaboration evidence from three empirical studies. Item examples are available upon request. First, a longitudinal survey (Study 1) of our project has been completed. This study involved over 50 student project teams with over 300 team members. Participants were working on a required semester-long team project in which creativity – generation of novel and useful ideas to a problem – was set as a key requirement for assessment. To collect the longitudinal data with the repeated measures, we obtained four weekly reports on group affect, task elaboration, and self-reported team creativity during each week. This design helped to capture the most meaningful weekly team experiences and interactions and variation of these experiences over time. Moderator variables (such as identification, reflexivity, transactive memory system, and etc) were also measured in the one-off survey of this study. A second study (with 105 student project teams) was conducted. These project teams were working on a research project required by a research method course. Again, this study involved group affect, task elaboration, moderators ( (such as identification, reflexivity, transactive memory system, and etc), and team creativity. In this study, we obtained external ratings of team creativity. A third study (involving 65 R&D teams in China) was conducted. This was also an longitudinal survey with the multi-wave multi-source design. As in the first two studies, this third study involved group affect, task elaboration, moderators, and team creativity. In this study, we also obtained external ratings of team creativity. These three studies come together provided meaningful results in support for conditional indirect effects of group affect on team creativity via task elaboration. An earlier manuscript was submitted to the Academy of Management Journal, and we received useful feedback from reviewers. Based on the feedback, we are working on a new paper version targeted at the Journal of Applied Psychology. In this regard, we consider a substantial achievement (80%) of Objective 2. Our third objective was to provide insights for scholars and practitioners to better understand team dynamics, and how to capitalize on group affect as a resource to foster creativity in teams. As mentioned in our previously progress projects, we had extended our work to consider the effects of different manifestations of group affect. Specifically, informed by our research discoveries and advice from an additional co-author (well known as a leading scholars in the area), we extended our scope to consider the two core manifestations of group affect. Specifically, we investigated not only the influence of group affective tone (mean affect shared by individual members) but also group affect diversity (variance of individual members' feelings). The manifestations of group affect are expected to explain group dynamics and team creativity more comprehensively. In our working paper mentioned above, we found support that mean group affect interacted with group affect diversity to influence team creativity via a team process. This indirect effect was moderated by team context (i.e., transactive memory structure). This provides insights for scholars and practitioners who wish to understand team dynamics more comprehensively, and how to capitalize on group affect to increase team creativity. Together with the progress made for Objective 1 and 2, Objective 3 is considered completed in this regard. | ||||||||||||||||
| Summary of objectives addressed: |
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| Research Outcome | |||||||||||||||||
| Major findings and research outcome: | The increasing popularity of project/group-based structures in organizations is due to their value in delivering timely and creative outputs, though not every project team lives up to these expectations. Project teams often lack an established approach to guide member interactions and knowledge sharing, though team creativity requires the exchange of unique or even opposing information and perspectives among team members. It is not surprising that creative processes are full of ups and downs, and are charged with and by emotions. In some occasions, team members may converge into similar or homogeneous feelings (e.g., all feel excited!). In some other occasions, members can feel quite diversely from each other, with some feeling enthused and positive and others feeling worried or disheartened. Given such a scenario, the question arises as to how members’ feelings (convergence and divergence) might be related to project teams’ creativity. Why are some project teams able to harness the resources and energy associated with positive and negative affect to improve team processes and creative output, while other teams fail to do so? Our research based on our GRF proposal contributes to answer the above questions. Specifically, in our working paper under preparation (see Part C), we demonstrated that group affect (i.e., the interaction of affective convergence and affective divergence) played a role in promoting team creativity via enhanced task elaboration (members' exchange, discussion, and integration of task-relevant knowledge and information). This paper also contributes to understanding of the boundary conditions of the mediated relationships. This paper is targeted at the Journal of Applied Psychology. Moreover, in our conceptual paper published in the Leadership Quarterly (please see Part C), we put forward a multilevel view of research on affect and creativity in teams and to address how contextual factors (leadership behaviors) may moderate the affect-creative process relationships at different levels. By conceptualizing affect and creative behavior as multilevel constructs embedded in teams, this integrative model is important because it explains how the affect-creative process relationship can coexist at multilevel. This holds potential to provide a deeper understanding as to produce performance in team creativity ultimately. Finally, the longitudinal approach we adopted in two studies (see Section 5.3 above) has the potential to demonstrate the temporally dynamic, varying nature of group affect and its relationship to variation in creativity within project teams over time. This addresses calls to move beyond the “group statics” approach to true group dynamics. | ||||||||||||||||
| Potential for further development of the research and the proposed course of action: |
We note that the correlational design we used does not allow definitive conclusions about causal relationships between group affect, team processes, and team creativity. However, support for a causal impact of affect on creativity can be found in decades of laboratory research in which affect has been manipulated and subsequent creativity measured. Although our predictions draw on this body of theory and are consistent with these mechanisms, we admit that the affect-creativity links can be reciprocal. For example, while a negative group affect may boost members' collective effort to be creative, a successful progress of team creativity could also help to produce a positive state shared by the members. In this sense, team creativity is a collective affect-regulation mechanism that might help to shift a negative group affect to the positive one. That is, being creative collectively may serve to enhance members' collective emotional wellbeing, which may in turn increase teams' sustainable creativity and performance. Future research may extend our work to investigate the reciprocity. | ||||||||||||||||
| Layman's Summary of Completion Report: | Collaborative efforts of members in project teams are recognized as an important creative asset for organizations. Promoting joint efforts to achieve creative outcomes is a challenge, especially given that team creative efforts are often emotionally-laden. We know that people prefer to work with similar others who share their feelings, so promoting a shared feeling among group members would seem, at least on the surface, to help team functioning including creativity. However, maintaining emotional convergence over time (such as keeping every project member happy) is perhaps not managerially practical and may in fact rob teams of valuable resources or increase the chances of groupthink. Our work suggests that, under the right conditions, diverse affective states among team members may also benefit team creativity. As our work suggests, whether group affect (homogeneity and/or heterogeneity) may increase team creativity or not depends on team contexts and resources (e.g., team reflexivity, a team's knowledge structure, etc) that help teams manage their affective dynamics. With effective resources in operation, team members may translate their affective energy and resources into creative breakthrough through the process of task elaboration, i.e., a task-focused process of idea exchange and integration among team members. | ||||||||||||||||
| Research Output | |||||||||||||||||
| Peer-reviewed journal publication(s) arising directly from this research project : (* denotes the corresponding author) |
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| Recognized international conference(s) in which paper(s) related to this research project was/were delivered : |
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| Other impact (e.g. award of patents or prizes, collaboration with other research institutions, technology transfer, etc.): |
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| SCREEN ID: SCRRM00542 |