Está en la página 1de 19

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.40

THE EMERGENCE OF TEAM CREATIVE COGNITION: THE ROLE OF DIVERSE OUTSIDE TIES, SOCIOCOGNITIVE NETWORK CENTRALITY, AND TEAM EVOLUTION
CHRISTINA E. SHALLEY1* and JILL E. PERRY-SMITH2
1 College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. 2 Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.

We introduce the concept of team creative cognition and discuss how it is transferred and infused within the team to enable the teams creativity. Specically, we propose that diverse personal ties outside of the team shape and strengthen individual team members creative muscle, and that this individual creative cognition is infused within the team through modeling processes, ultimately resulting in team creative cognition. We further propose that team member centrality in the teams sociocognitive network, as well as the evolution of the entrepreneurial team, are critical to fully understanding the infusion process and the resulting emergence of team creative cognition. Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society.

INTRODUCTION
Understanding ways to enable employees to be more creative has become increasingly important given creativitys critical role for the initiation and survival of rms in complex and competitive environments (Amabile, 1988; Mumford et al., 2002; Nonaka, 1991). For entrepreneurs in particular, creativity is central; yet little conceptual or empirical work has examined how creativity affects the creation, recognition, or exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities. To date, the majority of the conceptual and empirical research conducted on creativity has been focused on the creativity of individual employees (see Shalley, Zhou, and Oldham, 2004, for a recent review). This makes sense as many
Keywords: team creativity; creative cognition; social networks; diversity *Correspondence to: Christina E. Shalley, College of Management, Georgia Institute of Technology, 800 West Peachtree St., Atlanta, GA 30308, U.S.A. E-mail: christina.shalley@mgt.gatech.edu

creative ideas come from individuals; however, given that individuals are increasingly working within teams, it is important to determine how teams can be more creative. For example, although the focus of early entrepreneurship literature has been on the lone entrepreneur as the developer of the next breakthrough idea, more and more research in this area has recognized the role of entrepreneurial teams, particularly postinvention and pre-start-up (e.g., Chowdhury, 2004; Kamm et al., 1990). For example, high tech start-ups are generally driven not just by a single entrepreneur, but involve teams of individuals working together to move a new technology from idea to commercialization (Bygrave and Hofer, 1991). Thus, our focus is on the team as the unit of analysis. According to Kurtzberg and Amabile (2000: 289), research on team-level creativity must explore the evolution of ideas as they progress from one mind to another. Our arguments presented in this conceptual piece answer this call by exploring how imagination, insights, and creative ideas develop

Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

24

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


sociocognitive network centrality and stages in a teams development. Our initial focus is on creative cognition arising from exposure to diverse perspectives, ideas, experiences, norms, and so on, via different personal contacts. In addition, we argue that to fully understand the infusion process, it is also critical to consider the boundary conditions in which infusion is more or less likely to occur. In particular, we propose that an individuals centrality in their teams sociocognitive network can play a pivotal role in inuencing the teams creativity. Specically, we examine the interplay between who knows what in the team and how many other team members share the same knowledge. Finally, we consider the evolution of the entrepreneurial team, given that these teams are dynamic and go through a variety of phases of development. As a precursor to our model, we begin with a general overview of creativity and creative cognition, and then introduce and develop our concept of team creative cognition.

and evolve from one mind to another. In order for a team to solve problems creatively, it is not just a matter of assembling a collection of individuals who hold diverse views, have varied backgrounds, or are considered to be creative types. We propose that what is key is how team members approach problem solving and how member creative problemsolving approaches transfer from the individual to the team and become collective, synergistic cognitive processes of the team. In particular, we introduce the concept of team creative cognition. Team creative cognition is a shared repertoire of cognitive processes among team members that provides a framework for how the team approaches problems creatively. We discuss how team creative cognition is transferred and infused within the team, starting with individual members and ultimately residing within the team. As such, our central research question is how creative problem solving comes to reside in and be owned by the team. Team creative cognition is particularly critical for entrepreneurial teams, because creativity is not just a one-time event of discovering entrepreneurial opportunities, but is important throughout the startup process. While many assume entrepreneurs are creative given that they have identied new opportunities, entrepreneurial teams also need to think creatively in identifying, approaching, and resolving problems related to their business ideas. These teams require not only the novel combination of existing knowledge, but also the generation of new knowledge and solutions. The discovery of new and more complex ideas requires team members taking fresh perspectives and trying to view the situation in unusual and novel ways via creative cognition. In addition, entrepreneurial teams, although not part of a larger organization, do not act in isolation; rather team members are shaped by a broader context of informal personal relationships in their environment outside of the team. Specically, individual members are embedded in a system of personal relationships that are interlocked and inuence behavior (Oh, Labianca, and Chung, 2006). We view these external interactions as a way of starting the infusion process by affecting the creative cognition of individual members. We develop our ideas in the sections that follow. We start with individual creative cognition and move to the development and transfer of team creative cognition through an infusion process that involves implicit modeling processes. We also discuss how this infusion process can be affected by the teams
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

GENERAL OVERVIEW
In the literature, one way creativity has been dened is as an outcome where the focus has been on the novelty and potential usefulness of generated ideas (e.g., Amabile, 1983; Mumford, 2000; Shalley, 1991; Zhou, 1998). These can include ideas related to solving problems, new practices, or new procedures, as well as ideas about new products or services. As such, creativity involves imagination and insight that can ultimately lead to inventions and innovations. Creativity is a necessary, but not sufcient, ingredient for innovation. That is, creative ideas represent the foundation from which innovations can arise, but innovation requires political resources, emotional support, and gaining buy-in to the ideas, as well as obtaining the necessary resources required in implementing these ideas. In this way, creativity is related to innovation, but distinct from this concept, and is an importantalthough at times imperfect precursor to innovation. Obviously, entrepreneurs need to be creative to generate new opportunities and come up with the big idea. However, this is just one application of when creativity is important. Another way that creativity has been dened is as a process (e.g., Drazin, Glynn, and Kazanjian, 1999; Shalley et al., 2004; Shalley and Zhou, 2008). Creativity as a process requires employees overall engagement in creative processes at work, which can include both cognitive and behavioral processes. It is
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


this type of creativitycreative processesthat we focus on in this article. Unlike prior work that has focused primarily on creative behavioral processes (e.g., Gilson et al., 2005; Gilson and Shalley, 2004; Kazanjian, Drazin, and Glynn, 2000), our emphasis is on creative cognitive processes. The creative process is critical for innovative outcomes. Specically, the process of creative problem solving (i.e., creative cognition) can help move an idea from the generation phase to the successful implementation phase (Ford, 1996; Perry-Smith and Vincent, forthcoming). For example, consider a start-up team that has been formed to commercialize an entrepreneurial opportunity. These are teams of two or more individuals who form a team to start a rm based on an idea developed by one or more research scientists, where each member has some nancial interest in the rm (Kamm et al., 1990). In this case, the team already has the big idea, but must tackle a host of challenges and obstacles to bring the idea to market. For example, strategies must be developed, plans must be outlined, and most importantly, despite the best planning, the team must be ready to handle new and unforeseen circumstances and problems that will require modifying previous plans. As a result, improvisation, exibility, and imagination are critical throughout the pre- and post- start-up process. By highlighting start-up teams, we crystallize the importance of creative cognition in going from the creation or recognition of an entrepreneurial opportunity to a functioning rm with an implemented product or service. In the sections that follow, our theorizing about the transfer and infusion of team creative cognition centers on the interplay between social experiences outside the team and creative cognition that leads to ways of approaching problem solving more creatively. Our central premise is that capturing relationships of team members external to the team can tell us something about the team members cognitive structures. Specically, we suggest that individual team member outside ties, and in particular the diversity of these outside ties, can facilitate this members creative cognition. This creative cognition can be transferred and ultimately infused within the team via modeling processes that occur when they are interacting as a team, resulting in team creative cognition. However, we suggest that the likelihood of this happening is dependent on the team members centrality in the teams sociocognitive network, as well as the evolution of the team. When a team members creative cognition is successfully infused
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

25

within the team, the result is team creative cognition, a team-level phenomenon. See Figure 1 for a graphical depiction of our propositions. We start by conceptualizing and dening creative cognition.

CREATIVE COGNITION
Individual creative cognition The study of individual creative cognition has its roots in cognitive psychology (Finke, Ward, and Smith, 1992; Smith, Ward, and Finke, 1995), in which the focus is on the fundamental cognitive operations that produce creative thought. This area of research has focused on conducting experimental studies to examine the cognitive processes that operate when people are engaged in a variety of tasks that require the generation of novel ideas. A central premise of creative cognition is that all individuals have some capacity to be creative, in contrast to trait-based approaches to creativity that assume that some individuals are more creative than others due to innate personality characteristics (see Barron and Harrington, 1981 for a review). Although there may be individual differences in how creative someone is in general, the difference between one person who is more creative than another can be explained in part by variation in the use of speciable processes or combinations of processes, the intensity of applications of such processes, the richness or exibility of stored cognitive structures to which the processes are applied, the capacity of memory systems (such as working memory), and other known and observable fundamental cognitive principles (Ward, Smith, and Finke, 1999: 191). In order to produce creative outcomes, individuals rst need to engage in certain cognitive subprocesses that help facilitate their creative problem solving. For example, they may examine unknown areas to nd better or unique approaches to a problem, seek out novel ways of performing a task, and link ideas from multiple sources. A great deal of research has been conducted on individual creative cognition, with many of the researchers looking at these subsets of creative cognitive processes in somewhat different ways or examining only certain subsets of cognitive processes (e.g., Basudur, 2004; Basudur, Graen, and Green, 1982; Baughman and Mumford, 1995; Finke et al., 1992; Koestler, 1964; Runco and Chand, 1995). As such, we now are synthesizing a variety of approaches to studying individual creative cognition and organizing the literature into
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

26

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith

Figure 1. The emergence of team creative cognition

two broad sets of generative and exploratory processes. Specically, creative cognition involves: 1) problem identication and formulation; and 2) conceptual breadth. Each of these subprocesses, and their various components, will be discussed in this article. It is important to note that no one cognitive process within each set is necessary, nor sufcient, in and of itself, but it is the use of a combination of a number of these creative cognitive processes that encompasses creative cognition. Problem identication and formulation rst involves identifying that a problem or opportunity exists. Thus, creative cognition involves opportunity recognition as well as the discovery and development of new opportunities or problems. Once a problem is identied, the problem or issue can be phrased in multiple ways (Reiter-Palmon et al., 1997; Sternberg and Lubart, 1991). In order to frame the problem broadly, individuals need to be skilled in identifying the key elements of a problem, and they need to gure out how the different pieces or parts of the problem t together. Essentially, problem
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

identication and formulation helps highlight the full nuances of a problem for the problem solver, and can involve dening the problem in both concrete and abstract ways (Sternberg, 1999). Conceptual breadth is probably the cognitive subprocess that is most often considered when thinking about how to creatively solve problems, and research has found that time and effort spent in this set is signicantly related to creativity (Illies and Reiter-Palmon, 2004). This set of creative cognitive processes involves the wide search within and across categories of knowledge for diverse information that can be used to creatively explore problems (i.e., includes generative and exploratory processes). As such, this subprocess includes two very important component processes that problem solvers can cycle back and forth between: conceptual combination and conceptual expansion. Conceptual combination is the synthesis or merging of previously separate concepts to create a new idea. When separate concepts are combined, novel properties of each can emerge (Koestler,
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


1964). This can involve associative thinking, which is the linking of ideas from multiple sources, categories, or knowledge domains. Individuals also need to recognize the relevance of old information to new problems, and combine concepts to generate more complex ones. Therefore, at times, individuals may retrieve existing cognitive structures from memory, form associations among these structures or combine them, and transform existing structures into new forms ((Finke et al., 1992; Mednick, 1962; Novick, 1988; Ward, 1995). Conceptual expansion is the development of new ideas. This can involve divergent thinking in which individuals think across different categories or domains of knowledge instead of thinking along consistent, predictable lines (Guilford, 1967; Ward et al., 1999). Divergent thinking should lead to more ideas, which makes problem solving more complicated, but should result in a greater probability of developing a better solution. In addition, more ideas usually lead to more creative solutions, since the initial ideas generated are usually more common or traditional (Adams, 2001). Divergent thinking can also involve dissecting the identied problem to more closely explore its various components. In general, conceptual expansion enables individuals to modify concepts by adapting different perspectives and transferring information from one domain to another. A variety of creativity techniques can be used to help the problem solver in trying to generate novel ideas. For example, an individual could try to make remote associations between seemingly disparate objects or use metaphors to try to see the problem in different ways. Also, analogies can be used to think about the problem. Analogies focus on mapping knowledge from a more familiar domain to a less familiar one to help generate ideas. Essentially, creativity techniques are aimed at breaking mental sets in that they divert us from accepting whatever ideas come quickly to us and make us develop and consider other more unusual ideas. Team creative cognition In general, team cognitions roots are in individuallevel cognition, but team cognition emerges from the interplay of the individual cognition of each team member and the teams social interactions (CannonBowers, Salas, and Converse, 1993; Cooke et al., 2004). Creative teams go beyond merely being the aggregation of individual team members. Rather, we propose that these teams synthesize their individual
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

27

capabilities and together nd ways to form new ideas that are more than just the sum of their individual parts. For example, some researchers have argued that creative solutions can reside with a group of people rather than with any one individual (Hargadon and Bechky, 2006; Kurtzberg and Amabile, 2000). Team creative cognition is a teamlevel phenomenon that is an emergent property of the team and goes beyond the individual team members involved in the problem-solving process. We dene team creative cognition as a shared repertoire of cognitive processes among team members that provides a framework for how the team goes about solving problems creatively. The specic and appropriate cognitive processes may vary from team to team and problem to problem, but team creative cognition exists when team members share a common lens for how to approach problems creatively that dynamically iterates among the two subprocesses of: 1) problem identication and formulation; and 2) conceptual breadth, which includes conceptual combination and expansion. For example, team creative cognition includes the team members actively working together to construct the problem at hand, exploring multiple options, challenging assumptions, seeking different perspectives, combining different viewpoints, reecting on past actions, questioning ideas raised, and actively evaluating different options as a team. Team creative cognition is also an iterative rather than static process, where a team cycles back and forth between the two subprocesses of creative cognition as the team experiments with ideas, seeks feedback, and reects on what they have developed. Lastly, team creative cognition exists on a continuum from very low levels of creative cognition to very high levels. See Table 1 for a summary of the cognitive processes that can be included within a teams repertoire of approaches to solving problems creatively, and a summary of the key elements of team creative cognition. As a shared cognitive framework for how to think about solving problems creatively, team creative cognition resides within the team members collective minds for how to dene problems, and the use of different techniques to help in idea generation (e.g., use of metaphors and analogies, trying to view the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar). It also involves thinking across different categories of knowledge instead of along predictable lines, as well as conceptually combining new and sometimes older information to achieve new ideas. In addition, the cognitive subprocesses included in team
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

28

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith

Table 1. Overview of individual and team creative cognition Key subprocesses of creative cognition Problem identication and formulation Recognizing a problem or opportunity Multiple ways of framing the problem or opportunity Identifying the key elements of the problem. Conceptual breadth A) Conceptual combination The synthesis of previously separate concepts Making associations across multiple sources, categories, or knowledge domains (e.g., associative thinking) B) Conceptual expansion The development of new ideas Thinking broadly, using different categories of knowledge to generate ideas (e.g., divergent thinking) Using various techniques like analogies, metaphors, and making remote associations Key components specic to team creative cognition Shared repertoire of creative cognitive processes Combination of creative cognitive processes Synthesis as team members operate as a unit in their approach to creative problem solving Emerging process where members have a common lens or frame for approaching problem solving in a more creative way Iterative process A less static but more dynamic process Continuous cycling between processes as the team experiments with ideas, seeks each others feedback, and reects on what they have developed

creative cognition apply to the generation of alternatives and solutions, as well as the evaluation of these options, as the team cycles within and between the different subprocesses. Some divergent thinking techniques that are used at the conceptual breadth stage help in evaluating the options raised so far, as they search for metaphorical implications, use analogical reasoning to interpret information from different perspectives or within different contexts, and try to identify practical or conceptual limitations of the ideas generated. For example, the team together can examine the different aspects of what has been generated, interpret it using different perspectives or within different contexts, and search for potential implications of what they have discovered, as well as possible limitations to the ideas generated.

DIVERSE OUTSIDE TIES


Intuitively, it makes sense that entrepreneurial startup teams should be composed of individuals with different backgrounds, information, skills, knowledge, and expertise. Conventional logic is that diversity of knowledge and expertise in a group facilitates learning and search behaviors that lead to more creative and innovative solutions (Williams
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

and OReilly, 1998). In particular, these teams can combine diverse viewpoints and information, and challenge one another to think creatively. As a result, when teams are diverse in terms of demographic characteristics or area of specialization and they communicate and share their different knowledge, there may be improved performance (e.g., Bartel and Jackson, 1989; Bunderson and Sutcliffe, 2002). However, recently there has been increased attention given to the complexities of all types of diversity (e.g., demographic, functional background, experiences) for performance. In particular, research in the diversity literature in terms of varietydifferences in a particular category within a team (Harrison and Klein, 2007)is most applicable to the within team diversity that has been argued to be relevant for creativity. Although a category can represent any attribute, when it comes to variety within teams, they emphasize variety in terms of differences in information, knowledge, or experience among team members, such as diversity in industry experience, functional background, and nonredundant network ties. Van Der Vegt and Bunderson (2005) nd that the benets of having diversity of knowledge and expertise appear to be mixed. Their study suggests that a positive relationship between expertise diversity and team performance existed only when team members had a
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


shared identication with the group, since this gave them the motivation to persist and overcome the challenges associated with stereotyping members with different types of expertise. In addition, research has found that heterogeneous teams are not always creative. In some cases they are more creative than homogeneous teams; in other cases they are not (e.g., Chatman et al., 1998; Lovelace, Shapiro, and Weingart, 2001). Specically, the process decrements associated with diversity, such as more contentious communication and lack of trust, can outweigh potential informational gains. This applies to teams that are diverse in terms of area of specialization (Lovelace et al., 2001) as well as those that are diverse in terms of demographic characteristics (Chatman et al., 1998). Furthermore, diversity of knowledge and expertise may not be the explanatory mechanism for why teams with members who represent distinct social categories can achieve higher performance. That is, recent work has highlighted that the benets of diversity may be due to more extensive cognitive processing in the presence of diverse others, rather than from informational advantages of having diverse knowledge and expertise (e.g., Phillips and Loyd, 2006; Sommers, 2006). Lastly, entrepreneurial founding teams tend to be homogeneous with respect to functional area as well as demographics (e.g., Ruef, Aldrich, and Carter, 2003), as the teams tend to form around friendships, familial relationships, or prior work associations. Even when these teams are diverse, similar to teams in larger organizations, the effect of diversity on performance is complex. For example, Eisenhardt and Schoonhoven (1990), in examining entrepreneurial founding teams, did not nd a direct effect for heterogeneity of industry experience, but did nd an effect on performance when combined with other team characteristics. Thus, given these uncertainties about the true value of diversity of knowledge and experiences within the team and the host of team process challenges associated with creative cognition via internal group composition, we propose that the benets of contact with diverse others is best achieved from individual team member interactions with those outside the team. We take a social capital view of teams in that we view teams as being composed of individuals with personal ties within, as well as outside, their team. But here we focus exclusively on team member personal ties outside the team. In particular, a teams compilation of ties provides it with
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

29

access to a variety of resources that may help the team function and perform better (Oh, Labianca, and Chung, 2006). One prominent focus has been on outside contacts that provide task- or domainspecic knowledge that can be directly applied to the task at hand (e.g., Cross and Cummings, 2004; Cummings, 2004). In this way, ideas are discussed as being transferred across boundaries (e.g., Allen, 1977; Katz and Tushman, 1981) and reapplied in a new domain (e.g., Burt, 2004; Reagans and McEvily, 2003) or, in some cases, recombined (Hargadon and Sutton, 1997), but it is the knowledge accessed through contacts that is discussed as being recombined directly. For example, Reagans and McEvily (2003) found that the degree of diversity in the focal persons network was important for the potential to transfer knowledge. We take a cognitive view focusing directly on the mechanism of creative cognition and how individual member exposure to outside ties inuences creative cognitive processes that can be applied in a variety of domains. For individuals, there is prior evidence that personal contacts within or outside work can affect creative outcomes. For example, Perry-Smith (2006) found that relationships outside the focal rm facilitated creative performance when individuals were on the periphery of their organizational communication networks. In addition, Madjar, Oldham, and Pratt (2002) found that support from both inside (i.e., supervisors and coworkers) and outside (i.e., family and friends) work was positively correlated with employees creative performance. Each member of a team potentially has relationships with others outside the team that could be useful to the focal teams decision making if what is experienced can be cognitively transferred by the member with these ties to their own team. Creative cognition benets from broad social exposure in which the contact can be task specic as well as general conversations about work encompassing a variety of topics that may be less related to particular work tasks (Perry-Smith, 2006; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003). In other words, these ties may not be specically within the focal domain of the team, consistent with prior evidence that broad, divergent personal contacts, not necessarily within a particular problem domain, facilitates creativity (e.g., Perry-Smith, 2006, forthcoming; Rodan and Galunic, 2004). As a result, we focus on communication ties that may encompass informal advice and support, as well as socializing ties, to broadly capture a team members set of outside personal relationships.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

30

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


demographics may be important for creative cognition. For example, managers from different countries may have different frameworks for approaching problems (Erez and Earley, 1993). When an individual from another country is exposed to these novel approaches, he/she may consciously or unconsciously adapt his/her way of thinking and work to incorporate some of these novel approaches. In addition, exposure to individuals with a variety of experiences across different companies or industries may also be relevant (Beckman, 2006). This could include contacts with individuals representing a variety of teams that may be creative, given that exposure to creative individuals can generate more creativity (Simonton, 1984). Certain demographic characteristics may also be relevant when these characteristics are proxies for different perspectives and ways of approaching problems. For example, age may be relevant as various age groupings represent different learning styles and personality types (Borges et al., 2006). Proposition 1: Diverse ties outside of the team will facilitate individual team members creative cognition (i.e., problem identication and formulation, conceptual breadth).

The sheer exposure to how diverse others approach problem solving can shape and socialize how an individual attempts to solve problems. When team members have diverse outside ties, this means they are connected to people with potentially different perspectives and viewpoints. In particular, we focus on the heterogeneity among an individuals set of outside contacts, rather than whether an individual differs from each of their contacts. A person with a set of contacts who differ from one another cannot easily, without reection, make decisions that are consistent with any one contact. As a result, he or she must think autonomously and independently while reconciling divergent views. Furthermore, he/she may become more accustomed to thinking exibly as he/she moves from contact to contact and potentially must adapt communication styles and behavioral norms. When individuals are more accustomed to thinking exibly, they will be more likely to consider less obvious alternatives. As such, those with more diverse outside ties should be more focused on thinking across broad categories of knowledge, making remote associations, and experimenting in problem solving, all of which causes them to exhibit higher levels of creative cognition. We focus specically on individual members social experiences outside their team, in contrast to any formal contacts they may have with other individuals, units, or organizations with whom they are required to interact in the course of completing their work objectives. For example, many founding teams have advisory boards that serve as formal conduits for specialized knowledge and perspectives. We are not interested in these team-level formal connections to the founding team, since the tie to the team may not be attributed to any one team member, but to the team as a whole (see Hansen, 1999, for an example of this approach). In contrast, we are interested in the broad informal social experiences of individual team members (i.e., team members personal ties outside the team), consistent with the focus of network research on informal interpersonal ties (e.g., Brass, 1984; Krackhardt, 1990). Personal ties held by individual team members are key given that each team members social experiences have the potential to affect his/ her creative cognition. Any member with exposure to diverse perspectivesnot just team leaders or appointed contact personscan become practiced at reconciling divergent views and making unusual connections. A variety of diverse outside ties in terms of different backgrounds, past experiences, and
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

THE EMERGENCE OF TEAM CREATIVE COGNITION


We argue that when approaches to creative problem solving develop from social experiences outside the team, these approaches become more accessible and practiced by the individual. Consequently, in other situations that require similar skills (e.g., in the team setting), such as connecting seemingly disparate pieces of information or reconciling divergent perspectives, the individual team member tends to apply them. Singley and Anderson (1989) described how cognitive skills, such as procedures for solving problems, can be learned in one situation and applied to another task. As such, their work supports the notion that cognitive skills can take the form of general abstract processes that are transferable to different situations. In addition, research in the area of individual-level creativity suggests that creative cognition can be acquired and transferred in other settings (Finke, 1995; Guilford, 1967; Ward et al., 1999). Several additional areas of prior work support the notion of cognitive transference of creative
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


cognition resulting from social interaction outside the team. For example, from a social psychological perspective, Pettigrews contact theory (see Pettigrew, 1998, for a review) suggests that social relationships not specically related to the task at hand may shape how an individual approaches problems and interacts with others in a different context, in this case, the focal team. A similar process of transference is suggested by research on prior experiences. For example, Beckman (2006) suggests that norms and routines from prior company experiences are imprinted, such that individuals transfer these norms and routines within the team to ultimately affect team exploration. Similarly, Fleming, Mingo, and Chen (forthcoming) suggest how experiences on a variety of unrelated patent areas can inuence the creativity of a collaborative team. Thus, we expect that when individual team members have a diverse set of outside ties that results in individual creative cognition, this creative cognition will be transferred and enacted by the individual in the team setting. Team members with socially derived creative cognition from outside ties may not only transfer these new approaches, but also infuse them into their own teams problem-solving process, resulting in team creative cognition. This occurs via implicit modeling processes, whereby the member serves as an important role model for creative problem solving. According to Banduras social cognitive theory (1986), individuals can develop cognitive, social, and behavioral competencies through observational learning and enactive experience (i.e., personal experience). Observational learning can provide the cognitive and behavioral tools for creativity (Bandura, 1986), and can happen when individuals observe role models behavior, their modes of thought, and the work standards used. Role models can provide intellectual stimulation that serves to persuade individuals to try to emulate them. Models can help with the way to actively approach problem solving, the ability to question standard operating rules, the ability to develop new ideas, and the techniques to evaluate different options that have been generated. For example, cognitive modeling, which involves providing examples of appropriate rules and thought processes, has been found to lead to an increase in exibility and the divergence of ideas generated (Gist, 1989; Meichenbaum, 1975). Essentially, if individuals are capable of performing a behavior or thinking in a certain manner, but are not currently doing so, they are more likely to perform
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

31

it after observing a demonstration of the behavior or viewing different thought processes (Bandura, 1986). As such, examples and observations of ways of approaching problem solving can cause the other team members to also try working in this manner. Consistent with these ideas, research has found that the presence of creative role models serves to increase individuals subsequent creative performance (e.g., Jaussi and Dionne, 2003; Shalley and Perry-Smith, 2001; Zhou, 2003), and that highly creative people have often studied under highly creative individuals, or have been exposed to creative role models (e.g., Simonton, 1984; Zuckerman, 1977). Thus, in itself, this exposure to a creative cognitive role model should be more likely to lead to the infusion of creative cognition in the team via observational learning. However, the spread of creative cognition from the individual to the team does not occur only via observation, where modeling can occur regardless of interpersonal interaction. Banduras social cognitive theory suggests that cognitive processes can also develop via enactive experience, which is an individuals direct personal experience of attaining a task or skill (Bandura, 1986). Essentially, this occurs when individuals do not merely observe an example or behavior, but actively pay attention and store a symbolic representation in their mind about how to behave in particular situations. The interactive dynamics associated with working collaboratively on a team, in particular, can help facilitate this type of modeling process. For example, whether serving as a role model consciously or unconsciously, when an individual team member is high on creative cognition, he/she approaches the teams problem-solving process in more creative ways. As team members participate in the discussion, they are exposed to the creative problem-solving approaches of this member with creative cognition, and are able to react to it and have a free ow of ideas. As they see this team member modeling the use of taking fresh perspectives and trying to generate novel ideas, this should serve to weaken the other team members conventional mind sets. Furthermore, when teams are problem solving, they need to build on, combine, and critically improve each members ideas through open interaction and questioning (Amabile et al., 1996). As they are doing this, they cant help but pay attention to the different approaches to problem solving that a member with creative cognition may take. Therefore, they are more likely to have an enactive experience and attend to and store in
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

32

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


more creative (Nemeth, 1985). Again, this supports the notion that one members view, when different, can stimulate others on the team to think more creatively. Since one team members ideas, knowledge structures, and perspectives may impact how the others form their ideas, the infusion of team creative cognition can result. Proposition 2: Individual creative cognition from individual team members will be infused within the team resulting in greater team creative cognition.

their mind some of these creative problem-solving methods. Through their social interactions with each other, team members are exposed to new paradigms and perspectives that can enable cross-fertilization of ideas about the issue at hand and about how to think about the issues, resulting in creative synergy within the team. In other words, team members are not just observing a distant social model, but are interacting and working with this creative role model. For example, King and Anderson (1990) proposed that team creativity incorporates interpersonal discussion among team members. Also, Csikszentmihalyi (1996) argued that creativity does not occur in one individuals mind, but through interactions with others, and as such, interaction among team members is expected to lead to more and better ideas. Therefore, interactions with the ideas and experiences of other people can change the nature of team members thought processes, behaviors, and communication. As such, since team creative cognition is social in nature, these cognitive skills are contagious and become a property of the team due to their social interactions. Over time, teams come to realize the approaches they can use to develop new ideas as well as combine and integrate inputs from multiple team members to develop creative ideas. The logic of our argument so far is that if a member of the team invokes creative approaches to solving problems in the form of creative cognition, vicarious learning via observational and enactive modeling experiences can cause other team members to also approach problem solving in a different and more creative manner. That is, once team members see another member using different lenses than they may use in approaching problem solving, they may be more likely to try this approach as well. Consistent with these arguments, research has found that when new members are introduced to teams or old members who have left the team and then returned, the more long-term team members creativity is inuenced (Gruenfeld, Martorana, and Fan, 2000; Choi and Thompson, 2005). Specically, the longterm team members tend to provide more creative solutions when they have new or returning members on their team. This suggests that there is transference of new ways of problem solving. Similarly, research on minority dissent suggests that team members who hold minority views are inuential not because they merely persuade others to accept their ideas, but because they push the team to think more critically and question assumptions, which helps the team be
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

SOCIOCOGNITIVE CENTRALITY OF TEAM MEMBERS


Although we argue that team member creative cognition can be contagious and transfer throughout the team via modeling processes that occur as the team interacts, we recognize a variety of potential barriers that suggest this type of social inuence may make this transformation difcult to achieve. Teams will not change their processes every time individual members wish to approach problems in unique or different ways. Rather, teams tend to fall into set routines of how to approach problems, becoming used to using the same basic ways to reach decisions for the team. As such, it may be difcult for an individual team member with creative cognition to have an impact on his/her team and actually serve as a role model for how to think creatively. Therefore, a question is whether teams will be more likely to absorb creative cognition from certain individual members than from others. In order for an individual members creative cognition to become part of the teams creative cognition, several conditions must be met. First, the team member with creative cognition must want to share his/her unique perspective on how the team should approach problem solving more creatively. This is not necessarily desirable to the individual, since it means that this member has to go against the teams established norms and routines. Second, if he/she does share novel approaches to problem solving, the other team members have to pay attention to this member in order to have observational learning occur. Third, the team members must actually try to process what they are observing in order to have an enactive experience, learn from this role model, and infuse team creative cognition.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


We use an analogy here, and ask you to think of creative cognition as operating like unique information. Specically, we draw on the information-processing paradigm of group decision-making research (see Hinsz, Tindale, and Vollrath, 1997), which examines the sharing of information in group discussions (e.g., Stasser and Titus, 1985; Stasser, Taylor, and Hanna, 1989). In a classic study, Stasser and Titus (1985) found that groups did not share unique information well, and often would ignore any information that was not widely known by other members. Numerous other studies have replicated and extended this work and found that knowledge that is common among the group members tends to have an inordinate impact on the group response (see Tindale and Kameda, 2000). The reason for this nding seems to be that common information is more likely to be discussed, especially in the beginning phases of decision making. Sargis and Larson (2002) propose that this is because of a sampling advantage that common information possesses. Essentially, when more members have a piece of information before group discussion, more likelihood exists for that piece of information to be mentioned and discussed (Stasser, 1992; Stasser et al., 1989). Information in common may result in premature closure, in that when most members have common information, they have a tendency to reduce information exchange and reach consensus quickly. This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that people prefer to receive and present information and perspectives that are common (Wittenbaum, Hubbell, and Zuckerman, 1999). Those who present common perspectives are perceived by others as more competent, knowledgeable, and credible when they share information others already know (Wittenbaum et al., 1999). Although these arguments refer to sharing information, the same tendencies are expected when it comes to sharing creative cognition. The arguments suggest that a start-up team member with the capacity to approach problems using creative thought processes via his/her creative cognition may remain silent and not share a unique perspective or different approach to considering information. Finally, once initial preferences are formed, people do not like to change their minds (Brodbeck et al., 2002). Thus, even if the start-up team member with creative cognition voices unique perspectives or approaches later in the start-up process, these ideas will be considered less by the group than approaches they previously had knowledge of and, possibly, already evaluated and considered prior to the team discussion.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

33

This quandary of members holding unique approaches to problem solving (e.g., creative cognition) but not sharing them can be addressed by understanding a members cognitive status within the team, in the form of member sociocognitive centrality. A sociocognitive team network is a team member-by-member network that represents the extent to which each member holds common knowledge. In this case, knowledge can include pro/ con arguments in response to an issue (Kameda, Ohtsubo, and Takezawa, 1997), alternative choices, as well as the evaluation of those choices (Ward and Reingen, 1990). This network is considered socioin the sense that cognition is not intraindividual only, but is in reference to the collective team. While a relevant question is the extent to which social interactions within the team inuence the development of the sociocognitive network, we focus on the sociocognitive network irrespective of the social dynamics within the team. Sociocognitive centrality is dened as the degree of overlap between the knowledge held by one member and the knowledge held by other members (Kameda et al., 1997), or in network terms, the outdegree centrality in the team sociocognitive network. This can be more simply described if we think of a small four-person team. Those who possess more common knowledge with other team members are more sociocognitively central to their team, while those who possess more unique knowledge than others would be considered as being more sociocognitively peripheral. For example, consider team member A, who has four bits of knowledge about a particular issue. In a four-member team, if member B has two bits of the same knowledge, member C has three bits of the same knowledge, but member D has zero bits of the same knowledge, member A would be considered fairly sociocognitively central. On the other hand, member D has no overlap with member As knowledge or any of the other members knowledge. Therefore, member D would be considered on the sociocognitive periphery, at a fairly extreme level (see Figure 2). Therefore, the concept of sociocognitive centrality is tapping the distribution of a team members knowledge and perspectives across the rest of the team. Research has begun to explore the effects of team member sociocognitive centrality on the propensity of individuals to share their unique information, knowledge, and expertise. Sociocognitively central members have been found to be more inuential in team decision making (Kameda et al., 1997). When
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

34

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


Member A

Member C

X X X X

Y Y

Member B

W W

Member D

W = Member Ds knowledge X = Member As knowledge Y = Member Bs knowledge Z = Member Cs knowledge

Figure 2. Team member knowledge overlap

members are sociocognitively central, they are in the enviable position of being able to validate other members knowledge and perspectives while at the same time, the focal members knowledge and perspectives can be validated by others. As a result, other members perceive the central member as having a well-balanced array of skills, knowledge, and expertise. This team-generated belief about cognitive status enhances the members indirect inuence. In addition, sociocognitively central members are expected to be more involved in discussions. For example, Sargis and Larson (2002) found that sociocognitively central individuals spoke more often and contributed more knowledge-based comments than those who were sociocognitively peripheral. Thus, the more overlapping knowledge a member has with other team members, the more sociocognitively central he/she will be, and consequently, the more inuential he/she will be in team decision making. In many cases, an individual with creative cognition may have thoughts and ideas that differ from his/her teammates. We expect that even when a sociocognitively central members preferences for thinking and action are in the minority, this member will be more successful in problem solving than a sociocognitively peripheral member with the same minority preferences. This would be because sociocognitively central individuals would naturally take
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

a more active part in any team discussions, and be less resistant to other members alternative arguments or attempts to persuade them. Furthermore, a team members cognitive status in the team should play a unique and signicant role in approaching problem solving, and ultimately, achieving consensus around his/her preferred approach. Sargis and Larson (2002) found that the inuence of the sociocognitively central member occurred even when the central members preferences were in the minority. Similarly, Kameda et al. (1997) found that groups were more likely to choose the preference held by the most sociocognitively central member even when this members view was in the minority. We are suggesting that although a member may be central in the teams sociocognitive network, he/she can be either the facilitator or barrier for introducing unique approaches to a problem, depending on his/her level of individual creative cognition. For example, a member with diverse outside ties and high creative cognition may share common knowledge within his/her team, as well as possess unique approaches to solving problems. In other words, the unique approaches to thinking about the issues proposed by the member with creative cognition may not themselves overlap with the knowledge known by other team members. Ironically, although within the team one could say these individuals are entrenched within the status quo due to their sociocognitive centrality, their social experiences outside the team provide them with the creative cognition to serve as important sparks for creative problem solving within their team. On the other hand, it is not surprising that team members who are central in their teams sociocognitive network and who are relatively low on creative cognition will serve as barriers to their teams creativity in approaching problem solving. Here, the member has high cognitive status in the team, as noted by his/her centrality in the teams sociocognitive network, but he/she does not approach problem solving creatively, and instead follows established norms and routines for problem solving. Therefore, when a team member is sociocognitively central to the team and also high on creative cognition, it would be best for an individual members creative cognition to be transferred and infused within the team. The key here is that an individual member with creative cognition needs to have the cognitive status in the team, which is conferred through his/her centrality in the teams sociocognitive network, to be able to have the team pay attention to the novel
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Team Creative Cognition


approaches to problem solving that he/she is suggesting and modeling. In summary, members with diverse outside ties who are also central in the teams sociocognitive network are in the unique position to shape the team toward more creative cognition. These individuals themselves have higher creative cognition and they may have more inuence within the team because of their cognitive status. Since they have more overlapping knowledge in the form of possible arguments, response choices, and so on, they are more likely to be perceived as an expert. Thus, they can provide validation for others opinions and perspectives, even if they do not agree with these perspectives. In particular, even when their perspectives are in the minority (Kameda et al., 1997)which tends to be the case when one is introducing novel ideas and approaches that are unconventional, and perhaps breaking existing paradigmsthese sociocognitively central members will more likely inuence the direction of the teams cognition. For example, consider the important decision faced by pre-startup teams about the right type of person to join the team going forward. One of the members suggests a content expert that is unconventional given the product or industry. Instead of the team not paying much attention to this unusual suggestion, if the member is sociocognitively central, he/she may have a stronger basis for understanding other perspectives and may speak more about his/her idea versus withholding it. Furthermore, since he/she is more sociocognitively central to the team, other team members would be more likely to view him/her as a cognitive role model, possibly attempting to think in ways that they see the inuential member thinking. Proposition 3: The positive relationship between individual creative cognition and team creative cognition is moderated by the individuals centrality in the teams sociocognitive network, such that the relationship between individual creative cognition and team creative cognition is stronger at higher levels of sociocognitive network centrality.

35

ENTREPRENEURIAL TEAM EVOLUTION


Finally, entrepreneurial teams and the entrepreneurial process are dynamic and evolve over time (West, 2007). Therefore, it is important to consider
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

the role of time and the impact of the start-up teams evolution on the infusion of creative cognition. For example, how long a team has worked together can have an effect on members creativity and the way they communicate. On the one hand, an entrepreneur may be part of a commercialization start-up team where he/she is working closely with a multidisciplinary group over an extensive period of time. In other cases, the entrepreneur may have just started working with the team. As a result, stage of development of the team in terms of the entrepreneurial project time line may matter. Furthermore, time inuences team members level of familiarity with one another and with the task, affecting how much information is common versus unique among team members, and how important unique information is viewed by the team (Gruenfeld et al., 2000). Membership in the team, and the team itself, evolves over time from the pre-start-up phase to the start-up phase to the post-start-up phase, with members entering and exiting at various times. Thus, the team and its members evolve from the early stages of we have an idea through later stages of we have gone through all the planning to we are an ofcial form now, but are working through implementation issues. For example, some have posited three distinct phases of development in high tech start-up teams (Clarysse and Moray, 2004; Vanaelst et al., 2006). The prefounding phase, where the primary activity is to determine the market viability of the business, principally may be made up of technical researchers. At the end of this phase, a rm is formally established and the team enters the founding phase, where the team works to strengthen the viability of the business and secure funding, for example. At this point, roles become more formalized and other content experts may join the team. In the post-start-up phase, the team processes, roles, and structures have become more dened as the team works to develop and grow the business. Throughout this process, the team becomes more formalized, new members are joining the team, and old members may be exiting the team. We argue that there is a window of opportunity in which creative cognition can be infused within the team. Specically, the team will be most open to considering unique approaches to thinking about the problem in the pre-start-up phase of the project. This would normally be the time that members are trying to gure out how to get going, so they will be more cognitively open to hearing different approaches, more accepting of unique role models, and more
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

36

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


outside ties are in a unique position to steer the team toward creative problem-solving approaches. Finally, we discuss time as a moderator of the infusion of team creative cognition and the coevolution of the team. The concepts presented in this article extend existing theories of creativity by focusing attention on teams and the combination of social and cognitive processes. Much of the creativity literature has focused on the individual level, with the few studies that have focused on team creativity primarily following an input-process-outcome model that is dominant in research on teams (e.g., Cohen and Bailey, 1997) and stressing the role of team processes (e.g., Gilson and Shalley, 2004; Leenders, van Engelen, and Kratzer, 2003; Pirola-Merlo and Mann, 2004; Taggar, 2002). In addition, predominant explanatory mechanisms amongst creativity theorists, particular those in the organizational sciences, have been intrinsic motivation (e.g., Amabile, 1983, 1988; Shalley, 1995; Tierney, Farmer, and Graen, 1999; Zhou, 1998), with recent attention given to affect (e.g., Amabile et al., 2005; George and Zhou, 2002; George and Zhou, 2007; Zhou and George, 2001). Less of the work has focused on the important role of cognition for how ideas are generated, or the inuence of personal ties on team creativity (Perry-Smith, 2008). Finally, we focus on how individuals inuence the creativity of their contexts versus the more typical focus on how contexts inuence individuals, by highlighting how individuals with creative cognition can inuence the creative cognition of their teams. Additionally, we also contribute to the network literature by specifying the mechanism of individual creative cognition as a consequence of diverse outside ties that can be transferred and infused within the team to lead to team creative cognition. We suggest how creativity occurs by focusing less on recombinations of available knowledge (e.g., Cummings, 2004; Taylor and Greve, 2006), but more on general cognitive skills that are transferable and potentially applicable across a variety of domains and situations. Little research on entrepreneurial teams has focused on the team members networks and, in particular, members ties outside the team (Aldrich and Kim, 2007). Furthermore, whereas Obstfeld (2005) suggests a behavioral orientation in the form of tertius iungens (i.e., connecting otherwise disconnected individuals) that helps with translating creative ideas into real products, we
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

exible about actually trying different ways of thinking. Essentially, before there is an established roadmap or mindset about the standard way of doing things, the team should be more susceptible to the inuence of each of its members, including one that has creative cognition. Then, as team creative cognition is infused within the team, the team develops a repertoire of ways of thinking, interacting, and behaving, which will continue to evolve over the time line of the project. If creative cognition is not infused during this window of time at pre-start-up, the team is much less likely to develop team creative cognition later in the timeline of the project. They will have become more set in their routines, caught up in the problem-solving process, and more likely to resist making any changes in their planned work processes. For example, West (2007) found that post-start-up teams had signicantly less cognitive heterogeneity than pre-start-up teams. Proposition 4: The positive relationship between individual creative cognition and team creative cognition is moderated by the stage of development of the venture on the entrepreneurial timeline such that, the relationship between individual creative cognition and team creative cognition is weaker during later phases of the venture.

DISCUSSION
In this article, we explain how outside contacts inuence team members creative cognition, and the conditions under which individual creative cognition is infused into the team leading to the emergence of team creative cognition. In particular, we describe how creative cognition is strengthened in individual team members via particular outside ties, and how this creative cognition is spread from the individual to the team via modeling processes that occur through team interactions, ultimately resulting in team creative cognition. Our propositions follow the generation of creative thinking from individuals to teams, and develop multilevel ideas going from inside individuals heads, to their interactions with their team and outside others, to the team level. We also highlight the role of sociocognitive centrality within teams and suggest how these sociocognitive networks can interact to inuence the teams creative problem solving. In particular, sociocognitively central team members who also have diverse
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

Team Creative Cognition


suggest a cognitive by-product of interacting with diverse outside ties and a cognitive approach (i.e., sociocognitive network centrality) that helps with the acceptance of unique approaches in teams. Entrepreneurs are increasingly part of teams, especially after they have come up with their big idea and are trying to get their idea to market. In commercialization teams, for example, the entrepreneur may team up with relevant experts from various elds in an effort to effectively develop an idea. Although the academic scientist in this case may be the holder of the initial idea, there are a variety of obstacles that must be overcome throughout the commercialization process; obstacles that may require creative thinking on the part of the team. In this case, team creative cognition may be important, and our propositions suggest that cognitive status may provide another avenue of inuence that can help sway the group toward considering various alternatives, thinking exibly, and making unusual connections to solve various problems and move forward to commercialization. Our conceptual arguments also suggest applications outside entrepreneurial teams. For example, they suggest that general managers may need to worry less about the diversity within their team members and more about the diversity of team members outside contacts. The often touted value in diversity argument has become questioned more recently as to its true benets for working teams creativity (e.g., Van Der Vegt and Bunderson, 2005). We argue that what may be more desirable than demographic or functional diversity within the team is to compose teams that are more cognitively diverse, via having direct personal contacts with a diverse set of others outside the team. If managers can gauge the level of cognitive diversity of their employees, they may be able to put together teams that will potentially have higher creative cognition and more creative outcomes. Second, it is important to remember that although individuals may seem to be diverse or different from each other (e.g., differences in functional backgrounds or demographics), they may think in the same way (e.g., Phillips and Loyd, 2006). Therefore, there needs to be more of a ne-grained analysis of how diverse each team member is in his/her creative cognitive processes. Finally, if someone has a new ideasuch as an entrepreneurs idea for a new productin order for the entrepreneur to be cognitively inuential in the teams decision-making process, it is important for
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

37

that individual to be more central in their teams sociocognitive network so that his/her ideas are attended to. Our arguments also suggest a variety of implications for future empirical research. First, we realize that certain factors may make it more likely that creative cognition will be developed, transferred, and infused within the team. Since we argue that individual team members potentially serve as conduits and receivers of creative cognition for their team, a number of factors could moderate this effect, and it would be important to conceptually tease out these effects in future research. For example, the type of team (e.g., technology commercialization venture, autonomous start-up team) could have an effect on the teams processes and cognition. Also, there may be individual differences related to personality and personal style that could have an impact, such as openness to experience, extraversion, and some team members being more persuasive communicators than others. Another possibility for future research is to explore under what conditions creative cognition can be infused in the later phases of team development. For example, when a newcomer with creative cognition joins an in-progress team, he/she may be more inuential given his/her uniqueness to the team. First, existing team members tend to pay more attention to the new member. They are curious about how this person will contribute. If the member has weaker ties to the team, since he/she has not worked with the members, the existing members may not be surprised when this member approaches problems in a different way. For example, given that individuals prefer social and cognitive balance, they expect people they know well to agree with them and those they know less well to disagree (Phillips et al., 2004). Thus, they are more open to attending to and processing differences from newcomers. Interestingly, although the members may nd the newcomer disruptive to their processing, this member may still inuence the team to think in different ways. For example, in Gruenfeld et al.s study (2000), the teams did not necessarily adopt the idea of itinerate members (i.e., members who had been away from the group temporarily), but the presence of the pseudo newcomer did affect the overall creativity of the team. Thus, we expect that newcomers who have creative cognition can serve as an important role model for the creative cognition of entrepreneurial teams.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

38

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


REFERENCES
Adams JL. 2001. Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas. Perseus Publishing: Cambridge, MA. Aldrich HE, Kim PH. 2007. Small worlds, innite possibilities? Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal 1(12): 147165. Allen TJ. 1977. Managing the Flow of Technology. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Amabile TM. 1983. The Social Psychology of Creativity. Springer-Verlag: New York. Amabile TM. 1988. A model of creativity and innovation in organizations. In Research in Organizational Behavior, Staw BM, Cummings LL (eds). JAI Press: Greenwich, CT; 123167. Amabile TM, Barsade SG, Mueller JS, Staw BM. 2005. Affect and creativity at work. Administrative Science Quarterly 50: 367403. Amabile TM, Conti R, Coon H, Lazenby J, Herron M. 1996. Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Journal 39: 11541184. Bandura A. 1986. Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory. Prentice-Hall: Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Barron F, Harrington DM. 1981. Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual Review of Psychology 32: 439 476. Bartel CA, Saavedra R. 2000. The collective construction of work group moods. Administrative Science Quarterly 45: 197231. Bartel KA, Jackson SE. 1989. Top management and innovations in banking: does the demography of the top team make a difference? Strategic Management Journal 10(2): 107124. Basudur MS. 2004. Leading others to think innovatively together: creative leadership. Leadership Quarterly 15: 103121. Basudur M, Graen GB, Green SG. 1982. Training in creative problem solving: effects of ideation and problem nding and solving in an industrial research organization. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 30: 4170. Baughman WA, Mumford MD. 1995. Process-analytic models of creative capacities: operations inuencing the combination and reorganization processes. Creativity Research Journal 8: 3762. Beckman CM. 2006. The inuence of founding team company afliations on rm behavior. Academy of Management Journal 49: 741758. Borges NJ, Manuel RS, Elam CL, Jones BJ. 2006. Comparing millennial and Generation X medical students at one medical school. Academic Medicine 81(6): 571 576. Brass DJ. 1984. Being in the right place: a structural analysis of individual inuence in an organization. Administrative Science Quarterly 29: 518539.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

In addition, it is always difcult to try to examine individual-level cognition and attempt to measure different cognitive processes. Moreover, we have conceptualized team creative cognition as a shared repertoire of cognitive processes among team members, so the challenge of measuring cognition at the team level is even greater. Although a challenging construct to measure, it is critical for future research to pursue various measurement approaches. We offer a few ideas. At the team level, a combination of observational and self-report techniques can be used. Similar to approaches used to measure collective work group mood (Bartel and Saavedra, 2000), independent raters could observe teams and content code discussions that may be indicative of the team members engaging in the subprocesses of team creative cognition. Surveys could be used to capture self reports of engaging in certain cognitive processes and to uncover cognitive processes not apparent via observation. Agreement among team members could be used to determine the extent creative cognition processes are shared among many, or all, of the team members versus isolated to only one or two members. A nal area for future research is to further examine the role of inuential members of the team as to their cognitive diversity and position in the sociocognitive network, as well as their position in the network structure of the team itself. Specically, different teams will have different structures that represent the communication patterns of the team. For example, in some teams, all members communicate with each other. In other teams, some members may be on the fringe of the team with regard to their communication patterns, and they may communicate with only one or two other team members. There are a number of different communication structures that could exist, and what position the more inuential members in the actual network of the team holds may be interesting to examine. In summary, our propositions suggest a variety of avenues for future theoretical and empirical research. By highlighting the interaction between team social interactions and cognition, we inform the understanding of team creativity in general and entrepreneurial teams creativity in particular.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our editor Harry Sapienza, the participants of the SEJ Launch Conference, and Chad Navis for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

Team Creative Cognition


Brodbeck FC, Kerschreiter R, Mojzisch A, Frey D, SchulzHardt S. 2002. The dissemination of critical, unshared information in decision-making groups: the effects of prediscussion dissent. European Journal of Social Psychology 32: 3556. Bunderson J, Sutcliffe K. 2002. Comparing alternative conceptualizations of functional diversity in management teams. Academy of Management Journal 45: 875893. Burt RS. 2004. Structural holes and good ideas. American Journal of Sociology 110: 349399. Bygrave WD, Hofer CW. 1991. Theorizing about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 16(2): 1322. Cannon-Bowers JA, Salas E, Converse S. 1993. Shared mental models in expert team decision making. In Individual and Group Decision Making, Castellan NJ Jr. (ed). Erlbaum: Hillsdale, NJ; 221246. Chatman JA, Polzer JT, Barsade SG, Neale MA. 1998. Being different yet feeling similar: the inuence of demographic composition and organizational culture on work processes and outcomes. Administrative Science Quarterly 43: 749780. Choi H, Thompson L. 2005. Old wine in a new bottle: impact of membership change on group creativity. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 98: 121132. Chowdhury S. 2004. Demographic diversity for building an effective entrepreneurial team: is it important? Journal of Business Venturing 20: 727746. Clarysse B, Moray N. 2004. A process study of entrepreneurial team formation: the case of a research-based spinoff. Journal of Business Venturing 19: 5579. Cohen SG, Bailey DE. 1997. What makes team work: group effectiveness research from the shop oor to the executive suite. Journal of Management 23: 239290. Cooke NJ, Salas E, Kiekel PA, Bell B. 2004. Advances in measuring team cognition. In Team Cognition: Understanding the Factors that Drive Process and Performance, Salas E, Fiore SM (eds). American Psychological Association: Washington, D.C.; 83106. Cross R, Cummings JN. 2004. Tie and network correlates of individual performance in knowledge-intensive work. Academy of Management Journal 47: 928937. Csikszentmihalyi M. 1996. Creativity. HarperCollins: New York. Cummings JN. 2004. Work groups, structural diversity, and knowledge sharing in a global organization. Management Science 50: 352364. Drazin R, Glynn MA, Kazanjian RK. 1999. Multilevel theorizing about creativity in organizations: a sensemaking perspective. Academy of Management Review 24: 286307. Eisenhardt KM, Schoonhoven CB. 1990. Organizational growth: linking founding team, strategy, environment, and growth among U.S. semiconductor ventures, 1978 1988. Administrative Science Quarterly 35: 504529.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

39

Erez M, Earley PC. 1993. Culture, Self-identity, and Work. Oxford University Press: New York. Finke RA. 1995. Creative realism. In The Creative Cognition Approach, Smith SM, Ward TB, Finke RA (eds). MIT Press: Cambridge, MA; 301326. Finke RA, Ward TB, Smith SM. 1992. Creative Cognition: Theory, Research, and Applications. MIT Press: Cambridge: MA. Fleming L, Ming S, Chen D. 2007. Collaborative brokerage, generative creativity, and creative success. Administrative Science Quarterly 52: 443475. Ford CM. 1996. A theory of individual creative action in multiple social domains. Academy of Management Review 21: 11121142. George JM, Zhou J. 2002. Understanding when bad moods foster creativity and good ones dont: the role of context and clarity of feelings. Journal of Applied Psychology 87: 687697. George JM, Zhou J. 2007. Dual tuning in a supportive context: joint contributions of positive mood, negative mood, and supervisory behaviors to employee creativity. Academy of Management Journal 50: 605622. Gilson LL, Shalley CE. 2004. A little creativity goes a long way: an examination of teams engagement in creative processes. Journal of Management 30: 453470. Gilson LL, Mathieu JE, Shalley CE, Ruddy TM. 2005. Creativity and standardization: complementary or conicting drivers of team effectiveness? Academy of Management Journal 48: 521531. Gist ME. 1989. The inuence of training method on selfefcacy and idea generation among managers. Personnel Psychology 42: 787805. Gruenfeld DH, Martorana P, Fan ET. 2000. What do groups learn from their worldliest members? Direct and indirect inuence in dynamic teams. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 82: 4559. Guilford JP. 1967. The Nature of Human Intelligence. McGraw-Hill: New York. Hansen MT. 1999. The search-transfer problem: the role of weak ties in sharing knowledge across organizational subunits. Administrative Science Quarterly 44: 82 111. Hargadon AB, Bechky BA. 2006. When collections of creatives become creative collectives: a eld study of problem solving at work. Organization Science 17: 484500. Hargadon A, Sutton RI. 1997. Technology brokering and innovation in a product development rm. Administrative Science Quarterly 42: 716749. Harrison DA, Klein KJ. 2007. Whats the difference? Diversity constructs as separation, variety, or disparity in organizations. Academy of Management Review 32: 11991228. Hinsz VB, Tindale RS, Vollrath DA. 1997. The emerging conceptualization of groups as information processors. Psychological Bulletin 121: 4364.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

40

C. E. Shalley and J. E. Perry-Smith


Nemeth C. 1985. Dissent, group process, and creativity: the contribution of minority inuence. In Advances in Group Processes, Lawler E (ed). JAI Press: Greenwich, CT; 5775. Nonaka I. 1991. The knowledge creating company. Harvard Business Review 69: 96104. Novick L. 1988. Analogical transfer, problem similarity, and expertise. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 14: 510 520. Obstfeld D. 2005. Social networks, the tertius lungens orientation, and involvement and innovation. Administrative Science Quarterly 50: 100130. Oh H, Labianca G, Chung M. 2006. A multilevel model of group social capital. Academy of Management Review 31: 569582. Perry-Smith JE. 2008. When being social facilitates creativity: social networks and creativity within organizations. In Handbook of Organizational Creativity, Zhou J, Shalley CE (ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: New York; 189210. Perry-Smith JE. 2006. Social yet creative: the role of social relationships in facilitating individual creativity. Academy of Management Journal 49: 85101. Perry-Smith JE, Shalley CE. 2003. The social side of creativity: a static and dynamic social network perspective. Academy of Management Review 28: 89106. Perry-Smith JE, Vincent L. The benets and liabilities of multidisciplinary commercialization teams: how professional composition and social networks inuence team processes. In Advances in the Study of Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Economic Growth, Thursby M (ed). Forthcoming. Pettigrew TF. 1998. Intergroup contact theory. Annual Review of Psychology 49: 6585. Phillips KW, Loyd DL. 2006. When surface and deeplevel diversity collide: the effects of dissenting group members. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 99: 143160. Phillips KW, Mannix EA, Neale MA, Grueneld DH. 2004. Diverse groups and information sharing: the effects if congruent ties. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 40: 498510. Pirola-Merlo A, Mann L. 2004. The relationship between individual creativity and team creativity: aggregating across people and time. Journal of Organizational Behavior 25: 235257. Reagans R, McEvily B. 2003. Network structure and knowledge transfer: the effects of cohesion and range. Administrative Science Quarterly 48: 240267. Reiter-Palmon R, Mumford MD, Boes JO, Runco MA. 1997. Problem construction and creativity: the role of ability, cue consistency, and active processing. Creative Research Journal 10: 923. Ruef M, Aldrich HE, Carter NM. 2003. The structure of founding teams: homophily, strong ties, and
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

Illies JJ, Reiter-Palmon R. 2004. The effects of type and level of personal involvement on information search and problem solving. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 34: 17091729. Jaussi KS, Dionne SD. 2003. Leading for creativity: the role of unconventional leader behavior. Leadership Quarterly 14: 475498. Kameda T, Ohtsubo Y, Takezawa M. 1997. Centrality in sociocognitive networks and social inuence: an illustration in a group decision-making context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113: 296309. Kamm JB, Shuman JC, Seeger JA, Nurick AJ. 1990. Entrepreneurial teams in new venture creation: a research agenda. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice 14: 717. Katz R, Tushman ML. 1981. An investigation into the managerial roles and career paths of gatekeepers and project supervisors in a major R&D facility. R&D Management 11: 103110. Kazanjian RK, Drazin R, Glynn MA. 2000. Creativity and technological learning: the roles of organization architecture and crisis in large-scale projects. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management 17: 273298. King N, Anderson N. 1990. Innovation in working groups. In Innovation and Creativity at Work, West MA, Farr JL (eds). John Wiley & Sons: Chichester, U.K.; 81100. Koestler A. 1964. The Act of Creation. Macmillan: New York. Krackhardt D. 1990. Assessing the political landscape: structure, cognition, and power in organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly 35: 342369. Kurtzberg TR, Amabile TM. 2000. From Guilford to creative synergy: opening the black box of team-level creativity. Creativity Research Journal 13: 285294. Leenders RThAJ, van Engelen JML, Kratzer J. 2003. Virtuality, communication, and new product team creativity: a social network perspective. Journal of Engineering and Technology Management 20: 6992. Lovelace K, Shapiro DL, Weingart LR. 2001. Maximizing cross-functional new product teams innovativeness and constraint adherence: a conict communications perspective. Academy of Management Journal 44: 779793. Madjar N, Oldham GR, Pratt MG. 2002. Theres no place like home? The contributions of work and nonwork creativity support to employees creative performance. Academy of Management Journal 45: 757767. Mednick SA. 1962. The associative basis of the creative process. Psychological Review 69: 220232. Meichenbaum D. 1975. Enhancing creativity by modifying what subjects say to themselves. American Educational Research Journal 12(2): 129145. Mumford MD. 2000. Managing creative people: strategies and tactics for innovation. Human Resources Management Review 10: 313351. Mumford MD, Scott GM, Gaddis B, Strange JM. 2002. Leading creative people: orchestrating expertise and relationships. Leadership Quarterly 13: 705750.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

Team Creative Cognition


isolation among U.S. entrepreneurs. American Sociological Review 68: 195222. Runco MA, Chand I. 1995. Cognition and creativity. Educational Psychology Review 7: 243267. Rodan S, Galunic C. 2004. More than network structure: how knowledge heterogeneity inuences managerial performance and innovativeness. Strategic Management Journal 25(6): 541562. Sargis EG, Larson JR Jr. 2002. Informational centrality and member participation during group decision making. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 5: 333347. Shalley CE. 1991. Effects of productivity goals, creativity goals, and personal discretion on individual creativity. Journal of Applied Psychology 76: 179185. Shalley CE. 1995. Effects of coaction, expected evaluation, and goal setting on creativity and productivity. Academy of Management Journal 38: 483503. Shalley CE, Perry-Smith JE. 2001. Effects of socialpsychological factors on creative performance: the role of informational and controlling expected evaluation and modeling experience. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 84: 122. Shalley CE, Zhou J. 2008. Organizational creativity research: a historical overview. In The Handbook of Organizational Creativity, Zhou J, Shalley CE (eds). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: New York; 331. Shalley CE, Zhou J, Oldham GR. 2004. The effects of personal and contextual characteristics on creativity: where should we go from here? Journal of Management 30: 933958. Simonton DK. 1984. Artistic creativity and interpersonal relationships across and within generations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46: 12731286. Singley MK, Anderson JR. 1989. The Transfer of Cognitive Skill. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA. Smith SM, Ward TB, Finke RA (eds). 1995. The Creative Cognition Approach. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Sommers SR. 2006. On racial diversity and group decision making: identifying multiple effects of racial composition on jury deliberations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90: 597612. Stasser G. 1992. Pooling of unshared information during group discussion. In Group Process and Productivity, Worchel S, Wood W, Simpson JA (eds). Sage: Newbury Park, CA; 4867. Stasser G, Taylor LA, Hanna C. 1989. Information sampling in structured and unstructured discussions of threeand six-person groups. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48: 14671478. Stasser G, Titus W. 1985. Pooling of unshared information in group decision making: biased information sampling during discussion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 53: 8193. Sternberg RJ. (ed). 1999. Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, U.K.
Copyright 2008 Strategic Management Society

41

Sternberg RJ, Lubart TI. 1991. An investment theory of creativity and its development. Human Development 34: 132. Taggar S. 2002. Individual creativity and group ability to utilize individual creative resources: a multilevel model. Academy of Management Journal 45: 315330. Taylor A, Greve HR. 2006. Superman or the Fantastic Four? Knowledge combination and experience in innovative teams. Academy of Management Journal 49: 723740. Tierney P, Farmer SM, Graen GB. 1999. An examination of leadership and employee creativity: the relevance of traits and relationships. Personnel Psychology 52: 591620. Tindale RS, Kameda T. 2000. Social sharedness as a unifying theme for information processing in groups. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations 3: 123140. Van Der Vegt GS, Bunderson JS. 2005. Learning and performance in multidisciplinary teams: the importance of collective team identication. Academy of Management Journal 48: 532547. Vanaelst I, Clarysse B, Wright M, Lockett A, Moray N, SJegers R. 2006. Entrepreneurial team development in academic spinouts: an examination of team heterogeneity. Entrepreneurial Theory and Practice 30: 240271. Ward TB. 1995. Whats old about new ideas? In The Creative Cognition Approach, Smith SM, Ward TB, Finke RA (eds). MIT Press: Cambridge, MA; 157178. Ward JC, Reingen PH. 1990. Sociocognitive analysis of group decision making among consumers. Journal of Consumer Behavior 17: 245262. Ward TB, Smith SM, Finke RA. 1999. Creative cognition. In Handbook of Creativity, Sternberg J (ed). Cambridge University Press: New York; 189212. West GP III. 2007. Collective cognition: when entrepreneurial teams, not individuals, make decisions. Entrepreneurial Theory and Practice 31: 77102. Williams KY, OReilly CA III. 1998. Demography and diversity in organizations: a review of 40 years of research. In Research in Organizational Behavior, Staw B, Sutton R (eds). JAI Press: Greenwich, CT: 77140. Wittenbaum GW, Hubbell AP, Zuckerman C. 1999. Mutual enhancement: toward an understanding of the collective preference for shared information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77: 967978. Zhou J. 1998. Feedback valence, feedback style, task autonomy, and achievement orientation: interactive effects of creative performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 83: 261276. Zhou J. 2003. When the presence of creative coworkers is related to creativity: role of supervisor close monitoring, developmental feedback, and creative personality. Journal of Applied Psychology 99: 413422. Zhou J, George JM. 2001. When job dissatisfaction leads to creativity: encouraging the expression of voice. Academy of Management Journal 44: 682696. Zuckerman H. 1977. Scientic Elite: Nobel Laureates in the U.S. The Free Press: New York.
Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 2: 2341 (2008) DOI: 10.1002/sej

También podría gustarte