Group Creative Problem Solving: The Role of Creative Personality, Process and Creative Ability

Purpose: Team creativity is an important factor in developing new ideas for organisations. In spite of years of creativity research, little is known about various team aspects and their affect on team creativity. This study looks at the incremental explanatory value that team creative personality and divergent thinking skill processes have on team creativity. Methodology/Approach: Individual personality, creative personality, and divergent thinking skills were collected from 349 students at a large public university in the southeast US. These students were then randomly assigned to 105 teams where they developed a novel product. Individual attributes were averaged to create team attributes that were used to determine correlations with the product creativity. Hierarchical regression was used to evaluate incremental explanatory values for each of the independent variables. Findings: Group creative personality adds approximately 36 percent more explanatory power than cognitive ability and traditional personality measures in predicting team creativity. Creative processes, like team divergent thinking ability, further increased the R 2 of our model from 0.54 to 0.65 demonstrating that team processes affect team creativity. Research Limitation/implication: The task used in this study was not as complex as problems being considered by organizations. However, the results are expected to be indicative of the process used for more complex problems. It is also difficult to assign causality since correlations were used to verify some of our hypothesis. Originality/Value of paper: This research expands the findings of team creativity by identifying factors that increase team creativity.