Content area
Full Text
The problem and the solution. In spite of demands for teaming and creative outputs in organizations and for increasing workforce diversity overall, to date researchers have only scratched the surface regarding team creativity and appear to have ignored the role of diversity altogether. Fortune 500 team leaders identified as both successful in leading creative teams and who identify team diversity as important to their successes were interviewed for this study. In addition to several other key elements, team leaders credited a mix of employees with different characteristics as a key reason for team development of creative outputs directly impacting organizational success. Study findings are discussed and compared to related research. Recommendations for further study are provided.
Keywords: creativity; team creativity; teaming; leadership; diversity
The dynamic, global environment is increasingly part of daily interactions and decision making regardless of the type of work we do. Within this relatively new environment come demands for performance improvement and the need for creativity and innovation that utilize available workplace diversity as an important resource for success. As organizational stakeholders and customers become increasingly diverse, they also develop more specific demands. To ensure ongoing success, product development, service, and marketing strategy refinement, sales plans must be engaged and, when possible, rethought and redesigned for increased impact and efficiency. Failure to improve workplace creativity that fosters innovative solutions will result in organizational dissolution.
It is the position of many in public and private sector organizations that diversity contributes to an increased reservoir of experience, expertise, knowledge, perspectives, and skills that, when tapped, can contribute to organizational excellence (Wentling & Palma-Rivas, 2000). A challenge for every organization is how to harness the human capital represented in its current workforce. One of the main challenges is how to motivate organizational team members to work together to tap their individual ideas and diverse perspectives toward collective creative results.
It has been argued for several years that creative ideas cannot be generated without the benefit of contextual influences, including team member interactions (Csikszentmihalyi, 1988; Harrington, 1990). Despite these claims, "none of the existing [research] perspectives considers the potential changes in the generation of creative ideas that can occur when the inputs and interactions of other people are introduced" (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2001, p....