This edited volume from a conference held at Northwestern University concerns the latest research on creativity and innovations in groups. It represents research from three different camps: group, cognitive processes, and organizational behavior.

For the past two decades, creativity and innovation have been viewed by researchers as critical to organizational success and survival. Understanding the factors that facilitate or inhibit creativity and innovation at the individual level has been the focus of much of the research in this area. However, while earlier work on teams considered the working dynamics of the group as a context variable with individual creativity the outcome, research now emphasizes group creativity as the intended, desired outcome. This shift in thought has occurred because many of the problems routinely facing organizations are complex and cannot be solved by a single individual at the helm. Edited by Roni Reiter-Palmon, Team Creativity and Innovation provides readers with a state-of-the-art review of the major concepts and current research related to the demonstrable benefits of team creativity and innovation. In this volume, Reiter-Palmon and contributors explore such topics as team collaboration and communication, trust and psychological safety, team diversity, social networks, conflict, organizational learning, and more as a way to introduce readers to the issues that matter most in today's modern, forward-thinking workplace.

This volume presents a distinctly multilevel perspective on creativity and innovation that considers individual-level, team-level, and firm-level factors. In illustrating these factors, this volume presents both theoretical and practical implications to guide researchers and practitioners alike in the continued study and advancement of creativity and innovation in organizations. Chapter authors not only discuss the abilities, personality, and motivational attributes that contribute to employee creativity, but they also address the impact of leadership and climate on creative performance in teams. Subsequently, firm-level influences such as planning, learning, strategy, and professions that influence the success of creative and innovative efforts are examined. With contributions from leading scholars around the globe, this book offers a comprehensive review of creativity and innovation to assist researchers and practitioners in their quests to understand and improve organizational creativity and innovation. This is an essential resource for scholars, researchers, or graduate students interested in creativity, innovation, and organizational behavior.

This book reflects on the increasing variety of perspectives in organizational innovation research, paying attention to the antecedents, but also to the outcomes, of innovation. Some chapters analyze the ‘dark side’ of innovation, including the potential negative consequences of innovative behaviors, or of defying the innovation maximization fallacy. Others explicitly consider affective responses after innovation efforts, and assume that positive or negative effects rely on the context in which innovations occur, and on the way in which people manage the process of innovation. Several contributions adopt the dialectic approach by considering the multiple pathways and mechanisms that could lead to innovation at organizations. Most of the chapters include the interaction of actors’ characteristics (from employees or teams) together with situational constraints from the task or the social context, and outline the relevance of processes like team learning; motivation variables like basic need satisfaction; congruence of motives or meaningfulness at work; dynamics of communication networks; and affective variables. This edited collection offers a rich picture of current research and management trends in the field and contributes constructively toward promoting the dialectic perspective on creativity and innovation in the workplace. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology.

Creativity often leads to the development of original ideas that are useful or influential, and maintaining creativity is crucial for the continued development of organizations in particular and society in general. Most research and writing has focused on individual creativity. Yet, in recent years there has been an increasing acknowledgment of the importance of the social and contextual factors in creativity. Even with the information explosion and the growing necessity for specialization, the development of innovations still requires group interaction at various stages in the creative process. Most organizations increasingly rely on the work of creative teams where each individual is an expert in a particular area. This volume summarizes the exciting new research developments on the processes involved in group creativity and innovation, and explores the relationship between group processes, group context, and creativity. It draws from a broad range of research perspectives, including those investigating cognition, groups, creativity, information systems, and organizational psychology. These different perspectives have been brought together in one volume in order to focus attention on this developing literature and its implications for theory and application. The chapters in this volume are organized into two sections. The first focuses on how group decision making is affected by factors such as cognitive fixation and flexibility, group diversity, minority dissent, group decision-making, brainstorming, and group support systems. Special attention is devoted to the various processes and conditions that can inhibit or facilitate group creativity. The second section explores how various contextual and environmental factors affect the creative processes of groups. The chapters explore issues of group autonomy, group socialization, mentoring, team innovation, knowledge transfer, and creativity at the level of cultures and societies. The research presented in this section makes it clear that a full understanding of group creativity cannot be accomplished without adequate attention to the group environment. It will be a useful source of information for scholars, practitioners, and students wishing to understand and facilitate group creativity.

Although creativity is often considered an individual ability or activity, innovation in teams and organizations involves collaboration of people with diverse perspectives, knowledge, and skills. The effective development of collaborative innovations and solutions to problems is critical to the success of teams and organizations, but research has also demonstrated many factors which tend to limit the effectiveness of collaborative innovation of groups and teams. This volume highlights recent theoretical, empirical, and practical developments that provide a solid basis for the practice of collaborative innovation and future research. It draws from a broad range of research perspectives including cognition, social influence, groups, teams, creativity, communication, networks, information systems, organizational psychology, engineering, computer science, and the arts. This volume is an important source of information for students, scholars, practitioners, and others interested in understanding the complexity of the group creative process and tapping the creative potential of groups and teams.

This book examines how contemplative arts practice and a mindful approach to creativity, can be used to offer new possibilities for facilitating team creativity and collaboration in organizational settings. The author employs a qualitative, action research paradigm, using arts‐based and ethnographic methods, to explore the perceived effects of a contemplative arts workshop process on team creativity and collaboration within an organization. The book demonstrates how a contemplative arts workshop process may be used to facilitate mindfulness, trust, communication, collaboration, and creative insights among teams and working groups. It explores each of these themes in depth and develops a model based on those findings. The model includes five elements: 1. Individual-Level Mindfulness, 2. Trust and Authentic Communication, 3. Team Cohesion and Collaboration, 4. Creative Ideation and Insights, and 5. Leadership: Creating a Culture of Innovation. Combining theory and practice, the book offers a series of mindfulness and contemplative arts exercises that facilitators can use to address each of the five levels of the model. This book weaves together contemporary psychological research on mindfulness and organizational creativity along with practical applications and contemplative arts exercises for practitioners and scholars of workplace creativity, management and organisational and industrial psychology.