ASSESSING WORK GROUP CREATIVITY

Assessing Work Group Creativity

Assessing Work Group Creativity

Introduction

Lexington Ltd develops and distributes managerial training materials for manufacturing and service companies in the UK. The company was founded by James Reynolds ten years ago. The firm has grown steadily in domestic and export sales. Lexington had sales of £5.4 million in the last year. It projects a 10 per cent gain in domestic sales (about 80 per cent of the firm's business) and a 7 per cent gain in foreign sales this year. The firm currently has 50 employees engaged in production and sales work. The 'creative core' of the business consists of six employees and Reynolds who develop all of the company's video tape products and allied training materials. Around the company they are known as 'James's patrol'.

Primary Features of James Group

Lydia prefers to wear her hair in a 'neo-punk' style and it has occasionally been more than one colour at the same time. Wilson, on the other hand, is very conservative and prefers to wear a coat and tie at all times.

They have a free rein to use equipment and develop new training products and video tapes as they see fit.

They work closely with the filming crew, since they must produce all the written scripts which represent the basis for the management topics dramatised in the video tapes.

The group has divided itself into development and production areas. For instance, Lydia, Andrea and Lawrence typically brainstorm new products while Jack and Keith sketch out the scripts and search for suitable filming locations.

The group has no set schedule. They usually bring their lunches to work and they can often be found brainstorming new production ideas around the lunch table.

It is hard to say if there is a formal leader in the group.

Group's Composition & creativity

Nearly 50 years of empirical research has suggested that social influences have an inhibiting effect on creativity in collaborating groups such as design teams. This suggests that design teams may not be as creative as they could be, resulting in a negative impact on the design process (Nordstrom, 1998). In this paper we investigate the effect of group composition on creativity in terms of divergent thinking, in order to determine how best to support the creative process in design and the development of design environments. We present some novel results about 'group think', showing that real groups foster refinement of ideas while nominal groups foster duplication of ideas.

This paper describes the processes used in two composition projects, one with six sections of sixth grade general music, and one with a high school choir of 85 members (Orbell, 1997). In each project a professional composer was partnered with students to assist them in creating music that reflected their musical thoughts without limiting them to their prior musical skills and knowledge. While the students did learn to generate musical ideas and compositional techniques for treating those ideas in a larger context, the primary step in the compositional process that most differed from individual processes was that ...