Creative Thinking Affecting Team Creativity and Team Performance: Analysis Result of the Survey to Graduate Students in a Team Collaboration Project

Encouraging creativity in teams, not just in individuals, is necessary for today's business environment. However, in the previous studies aiming to enhance Team Performance, it is not clear how to combine the team members' creative thinking. The purpose of this study is to indicate the points in combining the four kinds of creative thinking of team members to enhance Team Creativity and Team Performance. Four kinds of creative thinking are divergent, convergent, experiential, and rational thinking. We visualized the recognition of the behavior of each individual and other team members by a method "Creative Thinking Map" and conducted a survey three times to graduate school students participating in a four months team collaboration project. The project reflects the real business situation since many students are involved in business activities besides their researches. We analyzed the survey result and identified two suggestion points. First is to include members who self-evaluate themselves to have sufficient "Rational" and "Divergent" thinking in the team from the initial phase. Secondly, we suggest each member to keep making efforts to control "Divergent" and "Convergent" thinking according to situations of the team and to be evaluated by other team members at the final phase of the project.

I. Introduction

Encouraging creativity in teams, not just in individuals, is necessary for today's business environment [1] [2]. According to Prati et al. [3], "many are required to work in teams in order to accomplish complex organizational objectives". However, there are not many pieces of research to indicate the ways to be more creative by collaborating within the team in an aspect of the way of thinking.