THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TEAM CREATIVE PROCESS SCALE AND ITS USE IN ORGANISATIONAL RESEARCH

Abstract

Creativity is increasingly seen as pivotal to business success. One way of which organisation achieve creativity is via their organisational work teams. From an academic perspective, studies in team creativity have drastically increased over the past decade; however, it is still very much under-studied in comparison to studies on individual creativity. The current thesis set sight to investigate a domain of team creativity studies that requires much more attention- the team creative process. The thesis particularly investigated into what constitutes the team creative process behaviourally. Through combining the theories, findings and approaches from both the extant literature of Creativity and Team Effectiveness, a conceptual framework for Team Creative Process Model was synthesized, which was subsequently developed into a new measurement scale. The Team Creative Process Scale (TCPS) was developed using a vigorous and systematic test development process, which resulted in a psychometrically sound, reliable and valid scale for the construct. The current thesis comprised of two main empirical studies of two different samples (Study 1-Self Report: n=631, Study 2- Organisational Team Sample: n=190 nested in 51 teams). These samples were used to conduct 14 different investigations. Investigation 1 to 6 (using data from Study 1) were designed to test the psychometric and statistical robustness of the TCPS. This includes Think-Aloud Protocol examinations, confirmatory factor analyses, reliability testing, as well as a series of studies to examine the predictive, convergent and incremental properties of the TCPS. Besides establishing the psychometric property of the scale, the TCPS was found to be a significant predictor of Team Creativity using self-report as well as supervisory ratings of creativity (Investigation 14). In Chapter 7, attempts were also made to examine the multilevel psychometric property of the TCPS so to testify its usability in organisational research. Investigation 6 to 14 (Study 2) were designed to explore TCPS’s relationships with a list of organisational variables under an organizational setting. Using a real-life organizational team sample, Investigation 6 and 7 set out to investigate the effect of team diversity on the TCPS. Using two types of diversity conceptualisations, we found that perceived diversity has a small significant effect over the TCPS, while objective diversity has a negligible effect on the TCPS. Five different moderator/press variables were also examined, for which, we found that Leaders and Coworker Support, Procedural Justice, Knowledge-of-Who-Knows-What and Conflict Management stands out to be the significant factors influencing the TCPS. Finally, besides discussion surrounding the studies conducted, practical implications and a series of future direction of research were also provided in the last chapter.

Date of Award	1 Aug 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Mark Batey (Supervisor) & David Hughes (Supervisor)