Connectors: A Catalyst for Team Creativity

doi:10.2308/TAR-2020-0671

Connectors: A Catalyst for Team Creativity

2023-12-11

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DOI：10.2308/TAR-2020-0671

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Creativity drives profit in an idea economy, and many companies organize teams to facilitate creativity. This paper investigates the strategic deployment of individuals to boost a team's creativity. More individualistic team members tend to generate highly original ideas yet are less likely to share these ideas. We theorize that adding a connector-an individual strongly predisposed to form and foster relationships-to a team will enable more idea sharing among individualistic team members, thus increasing the likelihood that the team's creative potential will be realized. We leverage a new conceptualization of the connector construct to identify connectors and then use an experiment to study the impact of their presence or absence on team creative performance. Our results support these predictions and suggest that connectors improve team creativity by enabling others to share in the creative process and not because connectors themselves exhibit greater creative performance than their average peer.

Keywords:

team creativity

connector

individualism

personnel control

management control system

Connectors: A Catalyst for Team Creativity

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