Affiliation:
1. Willamette University
2. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
3. The University of Tampa
Abstract
ABSTRACT
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.
Data Availability: The data reported in the paper are available from the authors.
Publisher
American Accounting Association
Subject
Economics and Econometrics,Finance,Accounting
Reference60 articles.
1. Management control systems in research and development organizations: The role of accounting, behavior and personnel controls;Abernethy,;Accounting, Organizations and Society,1997
2. Two types of bureaucracy: Enabling and coercive;Adler,;Administrative Science Quarterly,1996
3. Accounting for flexibility and efficiency: A field study of management control systems in a restaurant chain;Ahrens,;Contemporary Accounting Research,2004
4. Deploying “connectors”: A control to manage employee turnover intentions?;Autrey,;Accounting, Organizations and Society,2019
5. Individuals in mind, mates by heart: Individualistic self-construal and collective value orientation as predictors of group creativity;Bechtoldt,;Journal of Experimental Social Psychology,2012