Creative people- a help or a hindrance?
by Jeremy L. Schoen
We began our work with a basic question, “are creative people helpful or harmful in teams?” This might seem like a silly question. Especially when many management articles and most management gurus argue that creativity is needed in organizations. Staw (1995), on the other hand, says that most organizations do not want creativity. Creative ideas are often difficult to implement and require change. Thus, we set out to try to understand if creativity was helpful or not. We discovered, at least with respect to our research question, that the gurus (more or less) got it right.
Recent research suggests that most creative individuals don’t know that they are creative or see their way of solving problems as particularly creative (Schoen, Bowler, Schilpzand, 2018). Thus, most individuals may not fully understand how the way they frame problems affects how they solve them, or how this framing is likely to affect other group members. Because of this, their level of creativity attributes and ability (or ‘creative personality’) may not be best assessed with self-reports but instead requires covert measurement. Consequently, we relied on a conditional reasoning measure of creative personality that assesses the unconscious component of creative personality (Schoen et al., 2018). The theory provided by conditional reasoning argues that people use unconscious biases to support their preferred ways of doing things. These biases allowed us to link creative personality to team functioning.
If creativity affects teams, it should show up in how team members work together. One way to capture team functioning is via team conflict. While conflict is often measured in categories of task, process, and relationship conflict, recent work suggests that team members tend to experience one of four different combinations (or ‘profiles’) of the conflict factors (O’Neill, McLarnon, Hoffart, Woodley, & Allen, 2018). These combinations range from a dysfunctional form of conflict (where task conflict is low, but relationship and process conflict are high) to a functional form of conflict (where task conflict is high, but relationship and process conflict are low).
An important point about our work, and a deviation from the popular focus on ‘stars’ (people like Steve Jobs or Maya Angelou: individuals with considerable past creative achievement) is that we did not believe that one creative individual in a team would be sufficient to drive team conflict or team performance. Stars might drive performance once they have achieved star status in an organization but, in most work teams, individuals need to figure out how to work together. Thus, we theorized that the average level of a team’s creative personality would drive the type of conflict profile experienced by teams. Teams with a higher average would likely develop the more functional conflict profile and those with a lower average would form the more dysfunctional profile. That is to say, teams are likely to form a culture of lively debate where they are able to appreciate, develop, and implement different ideas when most people on the team have a moderate to high level of creative personality. In contrast, when most team members have a below average creative personality, they are unlikely to have individual capacity or interpersonal bonds to adequately handle the inevitable challenges that come with teamwork.
Ultimately, we found that the focus on stars is probably misplaced. Managers who want to help foster good teamwork should consider developing teams with multiple people who have higher levels of creative personality rather than hoping one individual can lift everyone else. In other words, even though the maximum within-team level of creative personality was highly correlated with the average level of within-team creative personality, the average level predicted conflict profile membership and the maximum did not. Those teams with higher team creative personality as a group average developed functional profiles of conflict. Those with lower averages developed dysfunctional forms of conflict. Additionally, conflict profile type was related to important team outcomes. Teams with the more functional conflict profiles exhibited higher levels of performance, higher levels of team potency, they saw themselves as more viable teams, and were more committed to their teams.
References
O’Neill, T. A., McLarnon, M. J. W., Hoffart, G. C., Woodley, H. J. R., & Allen, N. J. (2018). The structure and function of team conflict state profiles. Journal of Management, 44(2), 811–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315581662
Schoen, J. L., Bowler, J. L., & Schilpzand, M. C. (2018). Conditional reasoning test for creative personality: Rationale, theoretical development, and validation. Journal of Management, 44(4), 1651–1677. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206315618012
Staw, B. (1995). Why no one really wants creativity. In C. Ford & D. Gioia (Eds.), Creative action in organizations: Ivory tower visions and real voices (pp. 161–166). Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452243535.n21
About the Article
Creative Personality, Team Conflict Profiles, and Team Outcomes
Jeremy L. Schoen, Marieke C. Schilpzand, Jennifer L. Bowler, Thomas A. O’Neill
First published April 15, 2024 Research article
DOI: 10.1177/10596011241246655
Group & Organization Management
About the Author
