http://repub.eur.nl/res/aut/55215/ List of Publications en http://repub.eur.nl/static-eur/img/logo.png http://repub.eur.nl http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/37392/ 2012-10-12T00:00:00Z Hoever’s dissertation investigates the conditions and processes that enable teams to develop more creative solutions and optimally use their informational resources for higher creativity. Whereas teams, especially those composed of members with different task-relevant information and perspectives, are considered a particularly viable means to the end of higher creativity, systematic research on the factors that facilitate team creativity and the processes conducive to it is sparse and its findings remain fragmented to date. The three empirical studies included in this dissertation contribute to a more complete understanding of how teams achieve creative outcomes by addressing different aspects of this question. Hoever’s findings highlight that other-focused behaviours such as perspective taking and mutual feedback between team members represent important mechanisms to bring out the potential of team diversity for team creativity. Furthermore, on the basis of an in-depth behavioural observation of the teams throughout their creative process, she was able to develop a more nuanced understanding of the processes that underlie these observed effects. This analysis yields converging evidence for the importance of information elaboration as a precursor of higher creativity in diverse teams but not for other processes frequently suggested to transmit the benefits of diversity when they occur. Finally, the reported research points to the differential impact of formal external interventions in shaping team processes and information processing mechanisms in teams with diverse informational resources. Together, the reported research has important implications for future work on team creativity, diversity, and team processes. With regards to team creativity and diversity the results call into question the straightforward nature of the frequently proposed link between diversity and creativity and highlight a number of important moderators of this effect. Moreover, the findings indicate that the relationship between creativity and its antecedents at the team level do not fully mirror the effects observed at the individual level of analysis. Finally, they direct attention to the need to systematically investigate the extent to which diverse and homogeneous teams react differently to common managerial interventions such as feedback. http://repub.eur.nl/res/pub/35005/ 2012-07-09T00:00:00Z AB 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.