Diversity and Creativity in Work Groups

This chapter develops a dynamic model of how a work group's actual creativity may be affected by its composition and by how its early interactions unfold as members develop ways of working together in order to perform their assigned tasks. The chapter is organized into five sections. The first section presents a perspective on creativity in work groups. It then discusses different forms of diversity relevant to creativity. The third section develops a conceptual model of how diversity might affect a work group's early functioning; it focuses on how diversity may influence members' affective reactions to one another as well as the cognitive processes they use. The fourth section shows how these early interactions combine with variables — such as performance feedback and a group's self-monitoring activities — to affect a work group's subsequent interactions and its creative performance. The discussion targets work groups in organizational settings that have fairly stable membership, or at least have a core set of members who remain with a group for multiple phases of its work life. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of the dynamic process model for future research on work group creativity.