An Empirical Study On Organization Operation Principles To Enhance Group Creative Outcomes

During the past three decades, as team creativity is consistently playing a role in key competencies within organizations, an increasingly amount of researches using social and organization psychological perspectives have been engaged into group creativity study with remarkable achievements. Yet, lacking a matching framework, these fruits are separately and diversely distributed and sometimes contradicted with each other, a majority of which are focused on the micro interpersonal interaction and creative process inside groups. Domestic empirical study is still on a start-up step, thus limited to a narrow area of topics, few studies with an empirical approach and a social-psychological perspective on group creativity have been found. This literature expect to take a macro sight on organizations as a function, exploring the effects of praise objective, evaluation stress, psychological safety, task autonomy and group leadership decision making manner on group creative products. According to the conclusions, some organization operation principles with generic applicability will be given to help enhance team creative outcomes.60 undergraduates from Soochow University participated in this research were divided into twelve 5-person groups working on five separate creative tasks. The results are to support the discussions toward below five factors'effects on group creative products: praise objective (praise on creative activities, praise on creative products), evaluation stress (audience with evaluation tendency, audience without evaluation tendency, no audience), psychological safety (anonymous suggestion; nominative suggestion; high interest related task; low interest related task), task autonomy (high task autonomy, low task autonomy), group leadership decision making manner (leader of autocratic manner, leader of democratic manner, no leader). All the tasks are about idea generation using divergent thinking. The creativity of ideas will be evaluated by two indexes: fluency, that is the total amount of all ideas not counting the repeated ones; second, general creativity, consensual assessment thinking was employed to rate the creativity of each idea by three raters. The conclusions are as below:(1) The difference was significant when using different praise objectives regarding to the fluency of group creative products. Praising on creative activities leaded to a higher degree of fluency.(2) To the factor of evaluation stress, groups under audience without evaluation tendency condition presented a higher level of general creativity than groups under the other two conditions with a significant deference.(3) The difference was significant to two interest related levels on fluency, which revealed a higher degree when accomplishing a low interest related task. Also, when working on a low interest related task, the general creativity of products benefited from the nominative rather than anonymous condition; while under the anonymous situation, groups working on a high interest related task showed a significantly higher degree of general creativity.(4) The difference was significant toward different levels of task autonomy on ideas'general creativity. Groups working on a task with high autonomy outperformed those working on a low autonomy task.(5) Leadership decision making manner had a significant effect on both fluency and general creativity. On the fluency index, autocratic leadership manner leaded to a higher degree than that of the other two. On the general creativity index, autocratic leadership manner also outperformed democratic leadership manner, and leaders of autocratic manner showed a higher achievements than leaders of democratic manner at the same time.Guided by five conclusions, five principles in organization operation have been suggested to enhance team creative outcomes:Principle One: Praise team members'creative activities rather than products.Principle Two: Show neutral attention to team members during creating process rather than attention with evaluation tendency.Principle Three: Adopt a nominative suggestion system while accomplishing a low interest related creative task, and use an anonymous approach while working on a high interest related creative task.Principle Four: Try the best to increase task autonomy.Principle Five: Combine duty with rights. Make sure who making decisions be responsible for risks.