A Network View of Advice-giving and Individual Creativity in Teams: A Brokerage-driven, Socially Perpetuated Phenomenon

One potential benefit of team contexts is that members can share knowledge and ideas to help one another solve problems (e.g., advice-giving), thereby enhancing members’ creative potential. However, individuals’ advice-giving actions do not guarantee increases in recipients’ creativity and, in some cases, may even be a creative liability for the giver’s own subsequent creativity. We argue that considering advice givers’ brokerage in the team’s advice-giving network (i.e., advice brokerage) may clarify this phenomenon. Specifically, we posit that advice given from a brokerage position contains more nonredundant content that boosts recipients’ creativity. Further, we expect advice brokerage to positively influence a giver’s own creativity, though this effect is at least partially explained via recipients’ proximal creativity gains (e.g., recipients’ creativity change mediates the relationship). Recipients’ perceptions of psychological safety accentuate these relationships. Longitudinal field data support the main hypotheses, but also suggest that advice brokerage has more immediate proximal effects on givers’ creativity; an additional qualitative study elucidates several mechanisms by which brokered advice boosts creativity, including two associated with generating diverse ideas (idea integration, perspective-taking), two associated with domain-specific knowledge accumulation (knowledge accumulation, reflection), collective creativity, and creative feedback. The study yields several important implications.