The Cognitive Underpinnings of Creativity in Teams

This chapter examines how individual creativity and teamwork impact team creativity in part through self-efficacy mechanisms. At the team level, it examines the role played by creative collective-efficacy and teamwork collective-efficacy mechanisms in a team’s creative performance. It concludes that the individual differences leading to fit with the creative task may differ from those leading to fit with teamwork. That is, individuals may prefer creative tasks due to relatively high creative self-efficacy and relatively good performance on creative tasks but may not want to work in teams because of low teamwork self-efficacy and low performance as a team player. However, while traits are stable, efficacy beliefs can be positively influenced by managers. Therefore, interventions aimed at building efficacy beliefs are useful when organizations cannot select individuals solely according to a set of desirable stable trait characteristics.