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Abstract
This paper proposes a concept of overall team creativity based on the number of roles members of a team cover at the creative level of consciousness. The results of a decade of experience while developing a questionnaire-based approach to this at Stanford are presented. They show a tripling of the fraction of student teams winning prizes in an independently judged nationwide design contest. Data from the most recent three years suggests that a team's prize-winning ability increases with the number of roles covered at a creative level.
Introduction
Over the last decade Stanford's Engineering Design student teams have tripled the rate of their receipt of awards from the Lincoln Arc Welding Foundation in a program open to all US engineering colleges. This has been accomplished by forming the teams using psychological information involving innocuous student preferences. This method uses Jungian personality theory (Jung 1921), a notion of team roles (Wilde 1999), and a Jungian version of Belbin's theory of management teams (1981). Recently, Levesque (2001) and Wilde and Labno (2002) have related these roles-more precisely the corresponding cognitive modes of Jung-to different forms of creativity. Basically then, the improved performance seems to have resulted from increasing the variety of creative roles on the teams-perception roles during the first five years (Phase I) and then also judgment roles in the most recent three years (Phase II). Phase II data support a concept of overall team creativity based on the number of roles a team covers at the creative level of consciousness.
After presenting twenty-two years of prize data supporting the effectiveness of the team formation methods used, the article gives recent data supporting the hypothesis that greater role diversity leads on the average to better team performance as measured by prizes won. Ways to further progress are suggested.
Jungian typology role map
Following are two square graphs, together known as a role map, which visually describe the four-dimensional space of Jungian typology. Abscissas are the Sensory-iNtuition axis S-N in the Perception Domain (plane) and the Thinking-Feeling axis T-F in the Judgment Domain.
Ordinates are the Introverted Perception-Extraverted Perception axis Pi-Pe in the Perception Domain and the Introverted Judgment-Extraverted Judgment axis Ji-Je in the Judgment Domain.
The original coordinates may be written either as...