Content area
Full Text
Working in collaborative groups and teams now represents the practice predominantly adopted by organizations aspiring to create innovation. However, this trend towards boundless collaboration at work is harshly criticized for a resulting discrimination of introverted employees - called the New Groupthink. According to this, introverts suffer from working conditions that inhibit individual and quiet work. The current shift towards collaboration overall elicits lower creativity and achievement levels due to the resulting suppression of introverts. This inefficiency hence depicts a relevant issue for companies by reason of creativity and innovation s decisive stake in todays turbulent environments. Therefore, this quantitative research investigates whether hybrid brainstorming can equate introverts with extraverts by balancing their idea contribution. It suggests solutions to both introverts, with regards to enhancing their stake in ideation, and companies, with regards to how to apply ideation methods in most efficient ways.
Keywords: new groupthink, brainstorming, creativity, ideation, introverts vs. extroverts
INTRODUCTION
Today, increasingly globalized competition, new possibilities for production, as well as fast-paced technological developments jointly force companies to find strategies to assure their competitive advantage and long-term survival. Resulting therefrom, creativity and innovation have become central areas of interest as well as key success factors (Anderson, Potočnik, & Zhou, 2014; Tang, 2016). In this context, working in collaborative teams now represents the practice predominantly adopted by organizations aspiring to remain competitive (Korde & Paulus, 2017). However, this trend towards boundless collaboration at work is harshly criticized by a theory called the New Groupthink, which argues for a resulting discrimination of introverted employees (Cain, 2012, 2013). According to this perspective, introverts suffer from working conditions that inhibit individual and quiet work. The theory consequently argues that the current shift towards limitless collaboration overall elicits lower creativity and achievement levels due to the resulting suppression of introverts (Cain, 2013). In this regard, another focus of criticism is the most widely applied collaborative ideation method of group brainstorming. Since this prominent method normally does not allow for individual and quiet ideation, introverts are supposed to fall behind extraverts in this form of idea generation. The application of traditional group brainstorming was effectively found to bear several shortcomings that can be ascribed to multiple factors (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987, 1991; Lamm & Trommsdorff, 1973; Mullen, Johnson,...