Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
J Appl Psychol. 2012 Sep;97(5):982-96. doi: 10.1037/a0029159. Epub 2012 Jul 9.
Despite the clear importance of team creativity for organizations, the conditions that foster it are not very well understood. Even though diversity, especially diversity of perspectives and knowledge, is frequently argued to stimulate higher creativity in teams, empirical findings on this relationship remain inconsistent. We have developed a theoretical model in which the effect of a team's diversity on its creativity is moderated by the degree to which team members engage in perspective taking. We propose that perspective taking helps realize the creative benefits of diversity of perspectives by fostering information elaboration. Results of a laboratory experiment support the hypothesized interaction between diversity and perspective taking on team creativity. Diverse teams performed more creatively than homogeneous teams when they engaged in perspective taking, but not when they were not instructed to take their team members' perspectives. Team information elaboration was found to mediate this moderated effect and was associated with a stronger indirect effect than mere information sharing or task conflict. Our results point to perspective taking as an important mechanism to unlock diversity's potential for team creativity.
尽管团队创造力对组织至关重要，但促进创造力的条件还不是很清楚。尽管多样性，特别是观点和知识的多样性，经常被认为可以激发团队更高的创造力，但关于这种关系的实证研究结果仍然不一致。我们已经开发了一个理论模型，其中团队多样性对其创造力的影响由团队成员进行观点采择的程度来调节。我们提出，观点采择通过促进信息细化来实现观点多样性的创造性益处。一项实验室实验的结果支持了多样性和观点采择对团队创造力的假设交互作用。当多样化的团队进行观点采择时，他们的表现比同质化的团队更有创造力，但当他们没有被指示去考虑团队成员的观点时，他们的表现就没有那么出色。研究发现，团队信息细化中介了这种调节效应，并且与单纯的信息共享或任务冲突相比，其间接效应更强。我们的研究结果表明，观点采择是释放多样性对团队创造力的潜力的一个重要机制。
