A Model and Exploratory Field Study on Team Creativity

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to solve problems creatively or design new products and services. Research to date has mostly focused on individual creativity, rather than team creativity. This paper introduces the Team Creativity Model (TCM) to understand the antecedents of team creativity. TCM posits that both individual creativity and shared mental models (SMMs) contribute to team creativity. SMMs act as a mediator between knowledge sharing and team creativity. Antecedents to individual creativity include an individual's propensity to be creative and individual knowledge. Individual knowledge also is an antecedent to knowledge sharing, as are an individual's propensity to share knowledge and trust within the team. In an exploratory study at a telecom company, a team of design experts participating in four creative sessions provided initial support for the TCM constructs and their relationships. The findings suggest that further exploratory and empirical research on TCM is justified. Some tentative implications for research and practice are presented.