Creative Star or Teamwork?: A Disjunctive-Elaboration Model of Team Creativity

Using multi-source data from 60 teams of 483 employees in a Chinese franchised bakery firm, we examine a disjunctive model in which the creativity of a team’s most creative member predicts team creativity. Although the importance of creative stars permeates creative industries, evidence for the disjunctive model is scarce and mixed. To address this issue, we integrate the disjunctive model and insights in team processes. We propose a model in which team creativity is predicted by the creativity of a team's most creative member only when the subgroup surrounding the “creative star” does not elaborate much information. Because high information elaboration enhances synergetic processes that qualitatively alter individual inputs and render creative star’s creativity less predictive of team creativity. Results support this Disjunctive-Elaboration Model of creative star’s influence on team creativity. Moreover, results indicate substituting impacts between creative star’s creativity and subgroup information elaboration on team creativity-subgroup information elaboration is positively related to team creativity only when creative star is less creative. We outline how this testifies to the promise of integrating pooling-of-individual-inputs models like the disjunctive model with models of synergetic processes in team creativity research, and discuss its implication in team research more broadly.