| Description |
Organizations are increasingly relying on groups, rather than individuals, to generate creative ideas that facilitate corporate innovations and sustainable competitive advantage. An important benefit of group creativity is that group members can build on the ideas suggested by other members to generate unique associations that they might not otherwise consider when working alone. However, previous research suggests that creative groups often perform poorly relative to their potential, and existing interventions to facilitate group creativity have been disappointing. The objective of this study is to introduce and examine the "glue role" a different type of intervention for facilitating creativity in idea generating groups. Drawing on role theory, the glue role is a role-based intervention in which individuals are assigned to listen to the ideas suggested by others and make other group members aware of opportunities to build on those ideas rather than generating ideas of their own. Individuals in the glue role can facilitate creative group outcomes by helping group members manage the balance between generating their own ideas and listening to and building on the ideas of others. In an experimental study, I tested the effects of the glue role, alone and in combination with generic group-level instructions, on multiple outcomes of importance to creative groups, including idea quantity and quality, group member task enjoyment, and group viability. A three-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) found a iv significant three-way interaction among the glue role, group instructions, and task order on idea quantity and group viability. However, significant results were not found for the hypothesized main effects. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for understanding group creativity and how role-based interventions such as the glue role can be studied in other group contexts. |
