Creative Potential of Teams and Team Creativity: A Sensemaking Perspective

Abstract

 

An individual's role in a team undergoes several changes. Individuals while working in a team

engage in a constant sensemaking process and interprete their environment and accordingly

choose their actions as a member of the team. These changes either motivate an individual to

express new ideas or hold them back. This paper highlighting limitations of existing creativity

literature, invites researchers and scholars to assess creativity of a team in terms of its potential

to generate new ideas and not in terms of creative results achieved by the team already. The

paper offers a new taxonomy of creativity developing three levels of creativity Here three levels

of creativity have been defined, namely (i) Null Creativity, (ii) Nascent Creativity and (iii)

Nurtured Creativity. Null Creativity refers to a stage where in a team most of the individuals

abstain from expressing new ideas. The team has several ideas but they are mainly unexpressed.

This means that the team has lot of untapped creative potential. When a team has several ideas

expressed but they are yet to be accepted and be made a concrete creative outcome, the team is

said to have Nascent Creativity. Nascent Creativity is generally higher in the earlier stages of

workings of teams when many individuals were expressing ideas but later on the level of

Nascent Creativity reduces and these ideas are either accepted and hence the organization has

more of Nurtured creativity or these ideas lapse and individuals avoid expressing new idea which

eventually results in an increased level of Null Creativity.

 

In the 1975 movie by Sidney Lumet, 'Dog Day Afternoon' . This movie had a very interesting

scene which later became famous as 'Attica Scene'. There comes a moment when the character of

Al Pacino, that is trying to robe a bank and is negotiating with the Police about releasing twelve

members of the bank staff that have been held as hostages, indulges in a furious verbal exchange

with the police chief and suddenly erupts in a frenzy of shouting out loud "Attica, Attica". He

goes on shouting and the crowd present outside the bank (more than a hundred junior artists) join

him. The character of Al Pacino was making a reference to the Attica Prison Uprising that had

taken place at Attica, New York in 19712, in order to jeer at the Police force. The scene was so

well performed and it had such a great impact that the movie's line "Attica! Attica!" was voted as

the #86 movie quote by the American Film Institute (out of 100) while Al Pacino's performance

as Sonny Wortzik is ranked #4 on Premiere Magazine's 100 Greatest Performances of All Time

(2006)3. The scriptwriter of the movie, Frank Pierson, won the Oscar award for the best original

screenplay. However the most interesting thing about the abovementioned scene is it was never a

part of the original script. It was an improvisation, and this is what brings us to the subject matter

of this paper.

The question is, whose improvisation it was? Was it a scene thought out on the spur of the

moment by director Sidney Lumet? Was it an improvisation of the actor Al Pacino? The answer

is negative in both cases. According to Al Pacino4 precisely when the shooting began the

assistant director Brutt Harris just whispered in his ears "Say Attica". Al Pacino did that. The

junior artists acting as crowd members reacted to it and it turned out to be a famous scene. The

director of the movie was Sidney Lumet, who was not quite famous for depending on

improvisational performances. Still, when the actor Al Pacino started shouting "Attica Attica", he

went on rolling the camera. If one really makes an attempt to think as to what made this scene

possible, several possibilities emerge. First, the Assistant Director, Brutt Harris had the freedom

to express new ideas and he was aware of it. Second, the actor Al Pacino was open to receive

new ideas and he had freedom to improvise as well. Finally, the director was open to new ideas,

new interpretations and sudden improvisations that would add richness to the movie. If we think

of this in terms of a Team, managing a temporary project organization, this is a great example

where individuals belonging to different functions (in this case acting and directing), can

contribute new ideas to the ongoing task and more importantly they would be aware of the

freedom that they have for expressing fresh ideas. How can we differentiate a Team that is

indulged in making of a movie like "Dog Day Afternoon" and a team where nobody has any

freedom to express any idea or at least that is what everybody's perception is. Is it possible to

identify which team, on the basis of existing cultural and relational dynamics among its

members, is likely to express more ideas? Does existing literature on Organizational or Group

Creativity give us an answer? 

 Problems with Organizational Creativity Research  

The answer to the question posed at the end of the previous paragraph has to be a negative.  The

extant literature on Organizational Creativity suffers from several drawbacks which warrant

incorporation of new constructs and theoretical paradigms for creation of more robust and

complete theoretical perspectives. Let's have a look at major limitations of Organizational

Creativity research.

Mumford in his review of Creativity research (2003) identifies three distinct problems plaguing

the progress of creativity research; namely, (a) methodological isolation, (b) method equating,

and (c) inadequate depth of methodological development. The same could also be applied to the

research in organizational creativity.

 

Methodological isolation

Due to rapid advancement in the social psychology perspective, organizational creativity

research has been filled with research papers that primarily deal with organizational variables

with individual creativity. This has affected the research on organizational creativity on two

accounts. First, organizational creativity research has emerged as “employee creativity in

organization”, rather than explaining creativity as an organizational trait. Second, due to this

limitation, we have not been able to reconcile creativity literature with innovation literature and

that’s why we are still missing a robust and comprehensive theory about innovation. In order to

address the problem of such an isolationist view we need to develop new multimethod

perspectives, and link different methods in formulating more comprehensive designs.  Runco

(2004) summarizing major psychological approaches to creativity, says that individuals who

study and apply creativity should maintain a flexible approach and avoid relying too heavily on

one perspective, as creativity is a multi-perspective domain.

 

Definitional issues

Creativity has largely been studied as useful novelty (Amabile, 1989; Woodman et al, 1993).

Because of such “product” focused definition, assessment of products as ‘creative’ or ‘non-

creative’ is quite crucial. Moreover, creativity is generally considered to be a continuous concept

with a focus on how relatively creative something is, rather than a discrete decision that

something is or is not creative. However, processes and factors lead to more creative acts may be

different from what may be instrumental in smaller creative acts (radical vs. incremental

innovation). However, these issues have not been addressed within the organizational creativity

literature, and have remained confined to innovation literature.

 

Lack of Integration

Creativity has emerged as a multi level field and hence needs multi level theorizing (Drazin et al,

1999). Different theoretical perspectives suggest different units of analysis. Amabile (1996),

Woodman et al (1993) and others who follow their approach, study creative individuals within

organizational settings. They assess creativity in terms of the creative performance. Ford (1996)

advocates to study creative actions within different domains of the organization. Sensemaking

perspective advocates engagement in creative process as unit of analysis (Drazin et al 1999).

Collective creativity perspective makes a case for social interrelations among individuals in an

organization. Even though it has been advocated that some of these approaches are

complementary in nature (Drazin et al, 2000) and they can co-exist (Ford, 2000); not enough

attempts have been made to integrate these seemingly different perspectives. Unless these

approaches are integrated through robust empirical studies, it would be difficult to develop a

comprehensive theoretical model for organizational creativity.

Performance vs. Potential

Creativity research in general has still not been able to solve the debate as in what should be

studied, creative performance or potential for creative performance (Mumford, 2003). The

majority of scholars circumvent this problem by studying people who are doing creative work.

This approach softens the impact of variability of individual variables like cognitive styles and

personality and helps draw better insights in terms of environmental influence. However, since

possibilities of finding people dedicated to creative work are relatively less. Organizational

literature has sought a different solution to this puzzle. Organizational creativity literature has

studied potential through development of the instruments like Creativity Assessment Tools -

CAT (Egan, 2007). The creative performance has mostly been studied in form of “supervisor’s

opinions” about an individual employee’s creativity. (Except Tierney et al, 2002). Organizational

innovation literature, which has grown using various economical theoretical lenses, has used lots

of objective measures for performance.

 

Pragmatism has caused harm

Sternberg and Lubart (1999) mention that the impression conveyed by pragmatic, commercial

approaches to creativity is that its study lacks a basis in psychological theory or verification

through psychological research. The proliferation of social-psychology approach has moved

focus on assessment of creativity through recordable tests. As mentioned earlier it has definitely

helped some research but at the other end, it has led the academia to overlook the dynamic

element in the organizational context and the organizational responses to individual creative

behaviors.

 

Focus on end-result

Most of the theoretical as well as empirical work on creativity focuses on the product, i.e. a

successful creative idea. Such a skewed emphasis leads to two problems. One, only ideas that

reach the end of the process are studied, so the sample becomes biased toward more successful

ideas. Second, the categorization encourages retrospective analysis of the process leading to bias

in recollection (Unsworth, 2001). It is essential to understand whether all the attempts to achieve

a creative outcome bear fruits or not. In this perspective, Drazin et al’s (1999) theory is the only

one which makes a strong case for understanding, factors that make people engage in a creative

action. However, their approach follows an interpretivist research philosophy while the more

prominent social psychology approach follows a functionalist approach (Taylor & Callahan,

2005). As a result not many research designs have been devised to integrate these two

approaches.

 

Organizational Response

One limitation of the current creativity research is that, it still has not focused on the element of

organizational response. The current creativity literature quite exhaustively covers the impact of

organizational factors on individual creativity but it does not look enough at the impact on

organization (except the performance effect, covered by innovation studies). Csiczentmihalyi

(1999) states that “if any definition of creativity that aspires to objectivity, and therefore requires

an intersubjective dimension, will have to recognize the fact that the audience is as important to

its constitution as the individual to whom it is credited.” Even in the organizational context, this

definition holds absolutely true. If we aspire to define organizational creativity in an objective

manner, we ought to consider organizational response to individual creativity. This consideration

demands that we need to develop new research designs where we look at individual creativity

within organizational setting much more at the term of idea generation, and would not simply

pay attention at ideas that become successful and become accepted by the organization.

 

Lack of multidisciplinary studies

Organizational creativity has also suffered from another important limitation that is also a

limitation to creativity literature in general. Creativity has been studied by management scholars,

psychologists, sociologists and other social scientists with great enthusiasm. However, there has

been little effort to do cross-disciplinary reconciliation of different concepts and findings.

Wehner, Csikszentmihalyi and Magyari-Beck (1991) examined 100 then recent doctoral

dissertations on creativity. They found a “parochial isolation” of the various studies concerning

creativity. There were relevant dissertations from psychology, education, business, history,

history of science, and other fields, such as sociology and political science. However, the

different fields used different terms and to focus on different aspects of what seemed to be the

same basic phenomenon. They describe the situation with creativity research in terms of the

fable of the blind men and the elephant: “We touch different parts of the same beast and derive

distorted pictures of the whole from what we know: ‘The elephant is like a snake’ says the one

who only holds the tail: ‘The elephant is like a wall’, says the one who touches its flanks”.

Because of its complexities Magyari-Beck (1988) even went as far as to suggest that the study of

creativity needs a new discipline of “creatology” in order to be thoroughly understood.

A rigorous theoretical explanation of organizational creativity is extremely important in order to

move forward towards a robust theory of organizational innovation. Creativity within

organizational context has attracted researchers as well as practitioners alike. However, the field

needs more innovative research designs to capture multi-method and multi-disciplinary

perspectives to explain the phenomenon better. The field needs to address various issues such as

‘why organizations engage in a creative process’, ‘when would organizations engage in a

creative process’, ‘how ideas are generated’, ‘how ideas are tapped’, ‘how do ideas get

transformed’, ‘how creative ideas are expressed’, ‘which ideas are accepted for implementation

and why’, and ‘how do these creative ideas, affect organizational performance’ are some

important issues that need to be explained through a common theoretical framework. It’s a tall

order, but that’s the need of the hour.

 

Is Sensemaking an Answer?  

One possible solution to this puzzle of having a more robust theoretical approach for Creativity

research could be Sensemaking perspctive. The first application of sensemaking perspective to

existing organizational creativity research in form of builing a multi-level theory, was seen in the

much celebrated 1999 article, by Drazin, Glynn and Kazanjian.

Ford(1996) attempted to bring about a good confluence of psychology and sociology

perspectives in his multilevel theory; Drazin et al (1999) introduced a sensemaking perspective

that further departs from psychology–based theories of creativity. Drazin and Schoonhoven

(1996) urged the development of multi-level models that link a firm’s strategic focus to the

behavior of its senior managers and, in turn, to individuals’ commitment to the creative process.

This perspective defines creativity as the process of engagement in creative acts, regardless of

whether the resultant outcomes are novel, useful, or creative. This process orientation focuses on

how individuals attempt to orient themselves to and take creative action in situations or events

that are complex, ambiguous, and ill defined. In both the previous approaches, creativity at

higher levels was an aggregation of creative output at lower levels (Glynn, 96; Woodman et al,

1993). Sensemaking approach in contrast, looks at cross-level, systemic, and embedded effects

that may arise from idiosyncratic and communal interpretations of what it means to be creative.

Thus the focus shifts from individual to conflict, political influence, and negotiated order at

macro-organizational level over time and their influence over creative processes. Hence, it is a

deliberate attempt to develop an exclusively multilevel theory. However, they do not typically

offer a theoretical substitute for the componential and interactionist models. Rather, they suggest

that a process-orientation and sensemaking perspective leads to contexts that are expansive

enough to allow full exploration of multiple and different levels of analysis, e.g. an

interdependent, complex, large-scale, long duration organizational project. In such contexts,

creative processes can coexist as a companion to the individual and small group models that have

dominated the literature. The basic counterargument by sensemaking approach, against other

approaches is that other approaches, with a functionalist focus, have led  most of the research to

be centered around the question “How do you increase creative outputs in organizations?”

because most of the research defines creativity in terms of output. Alternatively, Drazin et al

(1999) define creativity as the engagement of an individual in a creative act. Creative

engagement is a process in which an individual behaviorally, cognitively, and emotionally

attempts to produce creative outcomes. According to sensemaking perspective individuals

engage themselves in a dynamic interpretation process, where they create meanings about their

social setting through interactions with others (Weick, 1979). However, they have agency and

they take actions that shape their environments (Giddens, 1994). Because of subjective

interpretations of their roles by individuals, within organizations, various levels of analysis

emerge:

An intra-subjective (Individual) level

An intersubjective level (between two or more individuals, that represents shared frames

of reference. E.g. formal groups or subunits)

A collective level that represents the unfolding of change across intersubjective levels.

According to the model an individual forms an intrasubjective frame of reference for creativity;

this frame mediates between events and engagement in creative acts. When individuals form part

of a formal group they will differ in the fames of reference they use to understand and engage in

the project. Given the type of role they are assigned, their frame of reference leads them to take

creative action in distinct areas. E.g. the technical staff will emphasize the need to experiment

and will attach greater importance to technical creativity; while the managerial staff will

emphasize the need to satisfy senior management and clients and will attach greater importance

to administrative creativity. However, the extent to and direction in which the group will engage

in creative behavior depends upon the balance of power that exists in the group at any given

time. A crisis situation will disrupt and disorganize the respective sensemaking frameworks of

different subgroups. The type of crisis will determine who is capable of resolving the crisis and

consequently the negotiated order of the collective structure will tilt in favor of those who can

solve the problem. E.g. crisis in functionality will shift the structure to favor referent frames of

the technical staff and the technical staff will engage more in creative behavior, while crisis in

cost or schedule disruptions will lead to greater engagement of management staff in the creative

behavior.

 

Sensemaking perspective of Creativity: impact and criticism

An important contribution of Drazin et al (1999) is that they made a strong case for inclusion of a

new epistemological dimension in the creativity research. They argue that before, creativity

research in organizational context had mostly been following a functionalist perspective. The

functionalist perspective is the combination of objectivity and order (Burrell & Morgan, 1979).

It’s an approach which is firmly rooted in the sociology of regulation and approaches its subject

matter from an objectivist point of view. Drazin et al (1999, 2000) criticized prior research

stating that it not only was functionalist but also reductionist i.e. in most of the research

creativity is seen as a valued organizational outcome to be manipulated by changing variables at

higher levels in the organization. Sensemaking perspective applies interpretivist perspective to

creativity research. Interpretivist perspective is the combination of subjectivity and order.

Interpretivsts are interested in understanding the nature of the world as it exists. More research

on these lines would promise greater insights from subjective experiences of the individual

participants in creative actions that take place within organizations (Taylor & Callahan, 2005).

The process based conceptualization of creativity is not a solitary attempt by Drazin et al (1999).

On similar epistemological lines, Mumford (2002) has defined social innovation, where he states

that creativity is “the generation and implementation of new ideas about how people should

organize interpersonal activities, or social interactions, to meet one or more common goals”.

Sensemaking perspective also offers a new insight regarding how individuals might engage in

creative process in organizations. However, it has not yet established itself as the commonly

accepted theoretical explanation for organizational creativity. Since, the proposition by Drazin et

al (1999) itself limits itself to complex, long duration project organizations; it is difficult to come

up with a feasible research design. Moreover, this perspective looks at creativity purely from an

interpretivist process perspective; hence it warrants rigorous case studies or ethnographic studies,

which are difficult to manage because of commitments it requires in terms of time and resources.

 

Role Theory : A New Entrant in the Scheme  

Hence, the Sensemaking approach tells us how team creativity will be shaped in case of crisis.

However, sensemaking process is not limited to crisis. Sensemaking is a non-stop ongoing

activity (Weick, 1995). Teams are a structured role system (Bechky, 2006). Teams organize their

work around definite structures of roles. These roles at times are not written or formally designed

but they are rather identities created by individuals through a process of sensemaking. Hence,

when individuals join a Team in order to perform a particular task they undertake a process of

sensemaking through which they come to define their role identities.

 

However these role identities, as the project progresses may be subjected to change, because of

constant refinement in the role identities of the individuals, which actually is a result of a

constant sensemaking process (Mehta, 2009). Role Identity determines what tasks or actions,

individual will get involved in, including ideas related to the creativity process, mainly Idea

generation and idea expression.

 

What determines creative outcome or creativity of a team is expression of ideas by individuals

and not just idea generation. Individuals engage in creative processes consistently, however the

way their roles evolve, determine their frequency and quality of expression of ideas (Mehta,

2009). It is possible that individuals define their tasks as decision tasks and continue to express

ideas. It is also possible that individuals define their tasks as execution tasks and limit their

performance to receiving instructions and might not engage in expressing new ideas or solutions,

unless asked for. However in a team, it’s almost impossible that entire team would define every

task as decision task. Nor is it possible that in a team almost everyone would define every task as

an execution task and not engage in creative expression at all. Also we have seen in preceding

chapters that it’s not sufficient that individual should be able to generate new ideas. Its equally

important that the team, the organization or the leader who happens to be the approving

authority, receives these ideas. In case of non-reception of ideas, individuals lose motivation to

express ideas and engage in idea generation activity and hence, the frequency with which new

ideas are generated in a team gets reduced. Depending upon these two parameters, (i) different

individuals’ idea expression tendencies and (ii) organizational reception of ideas; three types of

“Team Creativity” have been identified, namely (i) Null Creativity, (ii) Nascent Creativity and

(iii) Nurtured Creativity. Let’s understand each of them one by one.

 

Null Creativity

Null creativity, as the name suggests, is the level of creativity which doesn’t have any impact.

This happens in case where most of the individuals in the team exclude expression of ideas from

their role spaces. In other words, most of the individuals accept their tasks as execution tasks

rather than decision tasks. In this kind of a scenario most of the individuals refrain from

expressing new ideas and ideas generated at individual level stay unexpressed. In such cases,

individuals however may express new ideas upon being approached or persuaded by others in

order to solve a specific problem.

 

Nascent Creativity

Nascent creativity, as the term suggests is the level of creativity where ideas have been

expressed, however they have not yet been accepted or adopted by rest of the team. Nascent

creativity is a stage where most of the individuals have defined their tasks as Decision tasks. As

can be imagined nascent creativity is not a steady state. in case the team doesn’t accept or the

organization isn’t able to capture these ideas expressed by various individuals, individuals might

lose motivation to express new ideas and as a result in terms of level of creativity, the team

might recede to the previous stage, i.e. Null creativity. On the other hand, if the team or the

organization starts accepting ideas expressed by individuals, individuals might be further

motivated to keep expressing new ideas and as a result, eventually, the team might move on to

the next level of creativity, which has been defined as Nurtured creativity.

 

Nurtured Creativity

Nurtured creativity is the opposite stage of Null creativity. Nurtured creativity is the stage where

all the individuals in a team have defined their tasks as decision tasks and the team or the

organization has been able to capture these ideas and make them an organizational reality. It’s

not necessary that every idea expressed results in an innovation. However, it’s important that

every idea expressed has been paid enough attention. when most of the new ideas generated by

individuals somehow get a proper channel of expression and gets noticed by the leader or the

approving authority, even the non-acceptance of the idea, doesn’t result in a lack of motivation

for the individual. Individuals still tend to keep engaging themselves in the idea generation

activities and new ideas are generated with greater frequency.

Contributions, Limitations, Future Research  This paper is a theoretical paper and like any other theoretical paper it proposes a framework

which is subject to debates on the basis of theoretical plausability and open to test of

conformation through data analysis. However, this paper tries to incorporate two theoretical

dimensions within creativity literature in a different light, in order to improve the robustness of

the existing creativity literature. Social psychologists and Sociologists have always been puzzled

by the differentiating factor between individual's creativity in personal capacity and inividual's

creativity as the member of a team or group. What this paper has tried to highlight is that when

individual works as a member of a team, he or she has a different and constantly changing

perception of his or her role identity. Changing role identity affects individual's tendency to

express ideas. Eventually, if we look at the entire group, the overall idea generation depends on

how all the members of the group or team, have perceived their role identities and if these

perceptions are favorable to idea generation activity or not. On the basis of collective role

identities of individuals, we can know the creative potential of the entire team. This paper has

tried to give a taxonomy or classification on the basis of creative potential. However, it is open to

discussion, debate and empirical conformation.

 

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