7 Fostering the Creativity of Work Teams

Creative Leadership in the Midst of Diversity

Maria Kakarika

Introduction

Creative work—the joint novelty and usefulness of ideas about products, processes and services—is vital to organizational success and often done in teams (Amabile, 1988). However, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood, as it is associated with complex interpersonal processes between leaders and followers who interact in the creative process. Team diversity—“the distribution of differences among the members of a unit with respect to a common attribute such as tenure, ethnicity” (Harrison & Klein, 2007: 1200) has been argued to increase creativity because members have non-overlapping knowledge and resources (e.g., Milliken, Bartel, & Kurtzberg, 2003; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). However, a considerable number of studies have yielded inconsistent empirical results (Hoever et al., 2012) with diversity sometimes improving and other times hindering creative outcomes (Bantel & Jackson, 1989; Choi, 2007; Sethi, Smith, & Park, 2001). These mixed results suggest that main effect diversity models are not sufficient (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007) and that scholars need to consider more complex models and pay closer attention to at least two issues. First, they need to carefully select the appropriate diversity variable, given that the effects of diversity attributes vary greatly (Harrison & Klein, 2007; Horwitz & Horwitz, 2007; Joshi & Roh, 2009). Second, they need to further understand the conditions under which team diversity exerts the expected positive influence on creativity (Mannix & Neale, 2005; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998) by capturing moderator variables (van Knippenberg, De Dreu & Homan, 2004) such as leadership (e.g., Pieterse et al., 2010; Redmond, Mumford, & Teach, 1993; Shin & Zhou, 2003; Somech, 2006; Wang, Kim, & Lee, 2016; Wang et al., 2013). Despite significant progress in understanding creativity of diverse teams, we still lack an overall framework that can be used to better understand how to foster creativity and predict the conditions under which team diversity will be beneficial.

To address these calls, I draw on a recently published metatheory of team diversity (Mayo et al., 2017) and consider the effects of four different types of diversity on team creativity, while proposing that Facilitating forms of creative leadership (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015) may moderate this relationship. In so doing, I first consider the main theories of diversity: the predominant two-theory framework of information processing and social categorization (see the categorization-elaboration model [CEM]; van Knippenberg et al., 2004; van Knippenberg, van Ginkel, & Homan, 2013) and two additional theoretical lenses, disparity/(in)justice and access to external networks, thus taking a detailed look at the concept (see Mayo et al., 2017). Second, I explain the role of Facilitative creative leadership, defined as leading toward stimulating and strengthening the creative contributions of the team members, viewing team members as the primary actors within the creativity process (Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). Finally, I develop a conceptual integrative framework of creative leadership in the context of diverse work teams that takes into account complex interactions among various team diversity dimensions. That is, the framework is constructed around the mutual reinforcement of various diversity types and outlines the joint effects of leadership and diversity on team creativity.

The proposed framework contributes to the literature in several ways. First, it integrates different perspectives on team diversity and creative leadership that have developed independently with little theoretical synthesis into a unified framework. It thus contributes to the diversity literature by reconciling contradictory findings and extending the attempts to better understand the conditions under which team diversity has more or less positive effects on team creativity. Second, it contributes to the leadership literature that studies its effect on creativity (Redmond, Mumford, & Teach, 1993; Shin & Zhou, 2003, 2007) by contextualizing it in a more systematic way, capturing a wider range of diversity types and their tradeoffs. It thus builds upon past typologies (Mayo et al., 2017) and encourages future ongoing research on the complexity and specificity of creative leadership in terms of differences among followers and contexts (Hunter et al., 2011). Finally, by shedding light on how leaders can increase the creativity of diverse work teams in such a fine-grained, multi-dimensional manner, the proposed framework may prove useful to leaders and managers who strive to improve divergent processes in teams, and help diverse teams to converge around creative ideas.

This chapter proceeds through the following sections. First, I briefly overview the main four diversity theories and associated diversity types. Next, I propose an integrative framework of team diversity and leadership leading to team creativity as the dependent variable. In the final section, I discuss how this multi-lens conceptualization can help improve creative leadership research and practice in the context of team diversity.

Four Theories of Diversity in Teams and the Role of Creative Leadership

Diversity effects are explained by considering four basic theories of team diversity (see Mayo et al., 2017), as summarized in Figure 7.1 and described next.

Figure 7.1 A Framework of Creative Leadership in Diverse Organizational Teams

Social Categorization (Diversity as Separation)

Much of team diversity research is based on a social psychological view—i.e., on social categorization and social identity theory (Tajfel, 1981; Turner, 1987). According to these theories, individuals define themselves against others using easily observable generic social categories such as sex and race (e.g., Stangor et al., 1992). This perspective views groups as open entities, because group members identify primarily not with the work team but with a larger social group outside it. Tajfel (1981) and his associates showed that perception of belonging to a psychological group resulted in in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination (e.g., Brewer, 1979), socio-emotional and behavioral biases that divide teams into subgroups and create ‘separation.’ This field of research mostly studies differences in attitudes and beliefs derived from differences in category membership. Maximum diversity as separation (see Figure 7.1, Quadrant 4) refers to perfect disagreement between subgroups with different values, attitudes or beliefs (Harrison & Klein, 2007), which significantly hinder team performance.

This type of diversity is therefore expected to impair team creativity because of possible emotional or relational conflict and distrust resulting from being different (cf. Jehn, Northcraft, & Neale, 1999), as confirmed by past studies. For example, Baer et al. (2008) found that demographic diversity was negatively related to team creativity and became nonsignificant over time. Similarly, Pearsall, Ellis, and Evans (2008) found that the activation of gender faultlines negatively affected the number and overall creativity of ideas, and Choi (2007) found that gender dissimilarity hindered creativity. In such contexts, leaders may facilitate the creative performance of their teams primarily by managing emotional conflict management and creating a superordinate group identity that minimizes subgroup polarization.

Information Processing (Diversity as Variety of Information)

In contrast, the knowledge or information processing view explains that a diverse configuration of individuals feeds the team with a variety of knowledge, perspectives and skills that can render it more productive and creative (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007; see also meta-analyses by Bell et al., 2011). Maximum variety of information (see Figure 7.1, Quadrant 2) is present when each member has unique expertise (Harrison & Klein, 2007). The key idea is that a group that conducts complex tasks needs a large amount of cognitive resources for effective information processing, debate, problem solving and team performance (Simons, Pelled, & Smith, 1999).

This type of diversity should therefore increase creative performance of teams, because of idea variety and increased task conflict, as generally confirmed by past studies (e.g., Jackson, Joshi, & Erhardt, 2003; Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2001). For instance, both educational heterogeneity (Thornburg, 1991) and functional heterogeneity (Somech & Drach-Zahavy, 2013) have been found to increase group creativity. In such team contexts leaders may enable information flow by promoting healthy degrees of cognitive conflict and idea-challenging in order to spark and maintain creativity within a team (Hunter et al., 2011). They may thus support and empower followers, providing them with generous degrees of autonomy, because close monitoring has been found to have detrimental effects on employee creativity (Amabile et al., 2004; Zhou, 2003).

Disparity/(In)Justice (Diversity as Disparity)

The justice view or disparity and (in)justice approach explains how increasing heterogeneity in status, prestige and power harms the group and its members. Maximum disparity (see Figure 7.1, Quadrant 1) is present when one team member significantly outranks all other members in terms of a socially valued asset or desired resource. The resulting comparisons among team members lead to ‘internal competition, suppression of voice, reduced (quality of) communication, and interpersonal undermining’ (Harrison & Klein, 2007: 1201). Perceptions of ‘nonlegitimate’ asymmetry may cause feelings of injustice that distract members from key tasks and hinder group cohesion and performance (Greenberg, 1987).

It is thus expected that this type of diversity and the resulting competition and deviance will suppress team creativity because of reduced member input and withdrawal. Research shows that team members’ knowledge sharing, participation in discussions and experimentation is proportionate to their status and power in the team (e.g., Bunderson & Reagans, 2011; Cohen & Zhou, 1991). Those with higher status tend to dominate the discussion, whereas members with lower status are less influential, and mixed-status groups make poorer decisions (e.g., Hollingshead, 1996). In support of this reasoning, Choi (2007) found that hierarchical status diversity was negatively related to employee creative behavior. In such contexts, leaders may manage emotions and reduce feelings of injustice in order to avoid suppressing the input of low-status members and facilitate creativity within the team.

External Networks (Diversity as Variety of Access)

Team members may differ not only in skills and knowledge (i.e., individual human capital) but also in social connections to other individuals outside the group, both within and outside the organization (i.e., social capital) (Oh, Chung, & Labianca, 2004). The sociological or ‘variety of access’ view of diversity thus treats teams as open systems. Maximum variety of access (see Figure 7.1, Quadrant 3) occurs when each member’s social network is unique (Mayo et al., 2017). A large distribution of external ties can improve group effectiveness (Burt, 1992; Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Such external ties offer instrumental resources (e.g., technical support, money, partnerships, projects), socio-emotional resources (e.g., social support; see Swann, Johnson, & Bosson, 2009) and legitimacy (i.e., political support), because having diverse external ties, as opposed to having just lots of external ties, makes it easier to manage impressions, lobby and appear legitimate and credible to outsiders (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2015).

Past research has confirmed that social networks are especially important for creativity and that this type of diversity can enhance creativity (e.g., Baer, 2010; Brass, 1995; Burt, 2004; Perry-Smith, 2006; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2015; Zhou et al., 2009). For example, when members bridge structural holes their capacity for creative action is enhanced (Ancona & Caldwell, 1992; Burt, 2002; Hansen, 1999; Reagans & Zuckerman, 2001). In such contexts, leaders may adopt an external focus, encourage the use of external networks, foster coalitions and political support and, ultimately, enable the team to connect with various external sources of information (Mumford et al., 2002, 2014; Rickards & Moger, 2000) in order to increase input and facilitate the creative processes within their teams.

An Integrative Framework of Creative Leadership in Diverse Teams

The large number of studies developed within the four diversity lenses has greatly enriched our understanding of the effects of team diversity on team creativity but has also led to contradictory findings (Mayo et al., 2017). An important reason is that in most studies diversity was conceptualized as a unitary concept and operationalized in inconsistent ways (Harrison & Klein, 2007), failing to capture other perspectives. This lack of conceptual distinction between diversity types has therefore led to unspecified models, limiting valid comparisons across studies and cumulative knowledge. The Integrative framework, discussed next, addresses to an extent this theoretical limitation. It provides conceptual clarity and exploits the underlying synergies of the four diversity perspectives in order to provide a more comprehensive understanding of why diversity can increase creativity in some cases and decrease it in other cases.

Figure 7.1 depicts the proposed framework that can be used as a general conceptual springboard for developing a larger set of more specific investigations of how leaders can facilitate team creativity. The framework advanced here first melds the two schools of thought of information processing and external networks. As Figure 7.1 shows, information and access diversity types can reinforce one another in affecting the team’s creative potential. The cognitive diversity resulting from different knowledge, skills and abilities coming from both inside and outside the group is likely to boost task conflicts (i.e., disagreement on task-related issues: Jehn, 1995) toward creative performance (Pelled, Eisenhardt, & Xin, 1999). In support of this reasoning, Han, Han and Brass (2014) found that team-level human capital diversity (knowledge, skills and abilities) is one of the potential antecedents of social capital for team creativity. Similarly, Perry-Smith (2014) found that tie strength influences creativity through processing of non-redundant knowledge.

Leaders may thus improve synergy among team members, ease coordination and encourage participation with the external environment via communication with non team members in order to improve divergent idea generation and elaboration. For example, by intellectually stimulating their team members, transformational leaders can direct their attention to divergent ideas and urge them to experiment with new perspectives (Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009; Kearney & Gebert, 2009; Shin & Zhou, 2007; Wang, Kim, & Lee, 2016). They can develop a climate of psychological safety that allows them to share their ideas and experiences freely, and engage in interpersonal risk taking that is important for team creative outcomes (e.g., Lee, Choi, & Kim, 2018; Nishii & Goncalo, 2008; Oldham & Cummings, 1996). They may encourage some conflict and idea challenging in order to spark creativity (Hunter et al., 2011; Nemeth, 1997). They may also connect the team with various external entities to build support for their new ideas (Mumford et al., 2002) and act as a critical liaison in order to increase their creativity (see Venkataramani, Richter, & Clarke, 2014). These ideas are summarized in the following guideline.

The framework next melds the two schools of thought of social categorization and disparity/(in)justice. As Figure 7.1 shows, separation and disparity diversity types can reinforce each other and crucially influence team creativity. As previously discussed, diversity as separation creates polarized subgroups in conflict, with in-group members being biased against out-group ones. This bias is likely to intensify the negative effects of disparity and members may perceive more injustice and discrimination when power and status are concentrated in one or few members. That is, polarized values, attitudes and beliefs within the team may reinforce status or power differences, and vice versa (Mayo et al., 2017).

It is therefore pivotal for leaders to minimize the rise of social categorization and injustice processes. They may integrate the psychological subgroups that oppose one another within the work team in terms of values and beliefs, and manage intragroup conflict. For example, they may intervene to emphasize a superordinate identity and commonalities among members, which have been found to lead to recategorization, reduced bias and improved relations within teams (see Gaertner et al., 1993; Gaertner & Dovidio, 2000). Supporting this idea, Salazar, Feitosa, and Salas (2017) recently found that team identity salience reduces subgroup categorization and moderates the relationship between team diversity and idea novelty. In parallel, leaders may manage status differences, experienced inequities and resulting feelings of injustice, in order to enable followers to use each other’s creative inputs of each other and converge around creative ideas. This reasoning justifies the following guideline.

Although the aforementioned two guidelines provide insight into the team diversity-creativity linkage, they are clearly incomplete because all four types of diversity likely co-exist within a team. For example, even though a team may be composed of members with non-overlapping knowledge and external ties, concurrent status disparity and social categorization may cause members to contribute less to the discussion, neglect the value of certain knowledge areas, neglect to bridge across different knowledge pools and underutilize external networks. Therefore, the effect of team diversity on creativity becomes difficult to predict and likely depends on whether the potential positive effects of diversity (i.e., information processing and external networks) are maximized and, at the same time, the potential negative effects of diversity (i.e., social categorization and disparity processes) are minimized (see Mayo et al., 2017).

The proposed framework is designed to explain how leaders of diverse teams can have this dual effect and enhance team creativity. Leaders may consider all four theoretical lenses in unison and manage both internal and external social relationships in order to provide to team members a common base from which to integrate diversified ideas and perspectives and develop a creative final output. That is, leaders may actively promote a superordinate team identity in order to bridge polarized beliefs and manage emotional conflict stemming from status differences, while encouraging the active exchange of non-overlapping information stemming from the team’s human and social capital. These relationships are captured in the following guideline.

Discussion

This chapter began with acknowledging that although it is usually assumed that diversity is beneficial for creativity because of increased knowledge pools and networks, research did not always support this hypothesis and results have been inconclusive (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). It then proposed an answer to this puzzle, by arguing that Facilitative creative leadership moderates the relationship between four types of diversity and team creativity. The framework developed here provides new insight on the issue of boosting creativity by reaching out to multiple strands of diversity and contributes to the literature in the fields of team diversity and creative leadership in the following three ways.

This chapter’s primary contribution is integrating the four diversity theories with creative leadership, which brings together two research strands into a common conceptual framework for connecting their perspectives. It is broad enough to apply to different types of team diversity and specific enough to explain the role of creative leadership in diverse teams. It thus facilitates theorizing on creative leadership in organizations without compromising its contextual sensitivity and can stimulate a cross-fertilization of knowledge.

Second, by developing a common multi-lens framework that encompasses distinct diversity types, this chapter offers a more nuanced, more synthetic theoretical explanation of how leaders can pursue creative outcomes in team settings. It can be used to study the tradeoffs involved in leading diverse teams toward creativity and thus encourages research that approaches team diversity and creative leadership in a more holistic way. This framework can thus help scholars extend their understanding of team creativity and stimulate multi-theoretical research of creative leadership.

Third, future research can draw on this multi-lens perspective to develop novel empirical studies. With few exceptions (e.g., Shin & Zhou, 2007; Somech, 2006), there is little scholarly work on how interactions between leadership and diversity affect creativity. By adopting this framework, scholars can develop fine-grained hypotheses to move beyond main effects models, and consider more complex models that can be normatively useful. Cumulative empirical research based on a solid integrative framework is the only way to answer the question of how leaders can increase creative outcomes of diverse teams.

Although the framework presented here answers some questions, it also underlines questions that have not yet been addressed. One such question pertains to the effects of specific forms of leadership, such as transformational leadership. Even though intuition suggests that transformational leadership may make an important contribution to team creativity, empirical evidence on its role in fostering team creativity and innovation is scarce and mixed (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014; Eisenbeiss, van Knippenberg, & Boerner, 2008). Studies have either failed to find support for the relationship of transformational leadership and team creativity (e.g., Jaussi & Dionne, 2003) or found positive effects (e.g., Eisenbeiss et al., 2008; Gumusluoglu & Ilsev, 2009; Jung, 2001; Shin & Zhou, 2003, 2007; Sosik, Kahai, & Avolio, 1998, 1999) or curvilinear effects (Eisenbeiss & Boerner, 2010). The role of transformational leadership as moderator of the diversity-creativity relationship thus deserves more research attention.

Another unanswered question refers to which leadership styles and associated theories may explain how leaders can obtain creative outcomes in organizations and at which stage. For example, Mainemelis, Kark and Epitropaki (2015) proposed examining the social identity theory of leadership and Neubert et al. (2008) proposed examining servant leadership in relation to creative behavior. In addition, Rosing, Frese and Bausch’s (2011) meta-analysis suggested that leadership is more effective at the initial stage of the creative process, and past research supports this finding (e.g., Kanter, 1988; Mumford et al., 2002). Future research may thus delve deeper into this question and examine time-based dynamics and more complex interactions between time or stage of the creative process and various leadership styles. I hope researchers will use the framework to further refine future research and explore potential curvilinear effects of creative leadership in diverse teams.

Finally, while the posited framework has focused on Facilitative creative leadership as an act of fostering the creativity of others, diverse teams may also exist in Directing and Integrating contexts of creative leadership (see Mainemelis, Kark, & Epitropaki, 2015). For example, when teams are high on separation/disparity and low on information/access, emotional conflict may further shadow the existing overlapping input, and thus directing the materialization of a leader’s creative vision may be more effective for creative outputs. In another example, research that examines teams led by top chefs that are high on all diversity types may further examine how Integrative creative leadership synthesizes the creative vision of the top chef with diverse inputs from team members to achieve creative performance. Consideration of such additional context-dependent manifestations of creative leadership uncovers a new set of ways to apply the framework application.

Conclusion

How can highly diverse teams increase their creativity? I suggest that leadership is one important answer. The framework developed here supports the idea that leaders of such teams need to step back to get the overall picture. It outlines the role of leadership in orchestrating team members to use their resources optimally for higher creativity, while managing emotions and related conflict. It can be seen as a tool through which leaders can view the patterns of diversity through multiple lenses and act accordingly. In sum, this integrative framework suggests interesting avenues for future research and offers a basis for understanding how diversity can lead to creativity and thus can be turned into an asset rather than a liability.