Group Brainstorming and Teamwork: Some Rules for the Road to Innovation

A comparison between the groups literature and the individual creativity literature in the early 1990s revealed that they were quite consistent. The individual creativity literature emphasized personal characteristics and experiences related to creativity. There was much evidence that eminence and creativity often involve much solitary persistence. Eminently creative individuals were also renowned for their high level of motivation. They appeared to have a divergent thinking style and generated a high quantity of products (e.g., Simonton, 1988). Studies of groups generally found little basis for creative potential in groups (see Paulus, Brown, & Ortega, 1999, for a review). The most salient literature was that on brainstorming. The consistent finding in that literature was that groups tended to generate fewer ideas and fewer high-quality ideas compared with individual ideation conditions (Mullen, Johnson, & Salas, 1991). Amabile (1983) published her influential book on social context factors in creativity and emphasized that certain controlling factors such as evaluation and the use of reward inhibit intrinsic motivation (and thus creativity). However, she also emphasized how modeling and factors that enhanced intrinsic motivation could enhance creativity. Other scholars also highlighted the positive potential for social and group factors in creativity (Nystrom, 1979; Stein, 1982; West, 1990), and there was in general an increased interest in teamwork and its potential for enhancing productivity and innovation (see Paulus, 2000; West, 2003, for reviews). However, literature surveys yielded few references to group and team creativity or innovation (cf. Paulus et al., 1999). Recentlythere has been a significant increase in activity in those areas, leading to a volume summarizing research on group creativity (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003).