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Information elaboration is the mechanism through which diverse group members share unique knowledge and perspectives to form better and more creative responses to tasks. However, little is known about the conditions under which group members will be willing and motivated to engage in information elaboration. This article presents a field study conducted in an energy company to investigate that issue. Regression analysis of survey responses suggests that group members who have deep, underlying differences in perspective from the group engage in less information elaboration, particularly if they perceive themselves as similar to the group. Recognizing deep-level differences is helpful, however, when an individual also differs from the group in surface-level characteristics, because those differences improve information elaboration. This finding suggests that surface-level diversity prompts group members to understand and appreciate their deep-level differences.

Research on the creative process has focused on how an idea develops within a single focal creative project. But creators often work to develop creative portfolios featuring multiple projects that overlap and intertwine over time. Through an inductive qualitative study of creative workers in independent theater and in architecture, we explore how creators manage ideas across multiple projects when developing creative portfolios. Our emergent model shows how creators shift ideas across projects by stockpiling ideas from one creative project, transforming them into resources, and mobilizing them in their portfolios. Our analysis reveals that these practices unfold in distinct ways across two different processes for managing ideas: managing ideas strategically to build portfolios by realizing stockpiled ideas in new creative products across different opportunities, and managing ideas symbolically to balance creative outputs with new meanings constructed from unrealized ideas that represent the creator's identity and journey. Our findings reveal the critical role of stockpiling in creative work, showing how different ways of stockpiling transform ideas into resources for developing a portfolio. Our portfolio perspective on the creative process informs our understanding of creative portfolios as they develop and evolve as well as the dynamics of creative processes as they unfold across different projects.

Organizations that desire creativity often use groups like task forces, decision panels, and selection committees with the primary purpose of evaluating novel ideas. Those groups need to keep at least some novel ideas alive while also assessing the usefulness of ideas. Research suggests, however, that such groups often prefer proven ideas whose usefulness can be easily predicted and reject novel ideas early in the course of discussion. How those groups deal with the tension between novelty and the predictability of idea usefulness in the process of overcoming a bias against novelty is therefore an important question for understanding organizational creativity and innovation. We explore that question with a qualitative study of the discussions of four healthcare policy groups who confronted the tension early in the process of evaluating ideas. Unlike prior work that emphasizes how groups integrate tensions to build consensus around ideas, our study showed that overcoming a bias against novelty involved maintaining tension by fracturing a group's shared understanding of usefulness and retaining those divergent perspectives alongside moments of consensus. We describe this as a diverging consensus model of overcoming a bias against novelty. Our work contributes to the literature examining how groups can productively engage with tensions and provides a dynamic process for how groups might overcome the bias against novelty and therefore keep some novel ideas alive to fuel organizational creativity and innovation.

Research on group creativity has concentrated on explaining how the group context influences idea generation and has conceptualized the evaluation of creative ideas as a process of convergent decision making that takes place after ideas are generated to improve the quality of the group's creative output. We challenge this view by exploring the situated nature of evaluations that occur throughout the creative process. We present an inductive qualitative process analysis of four U.S. healthcare policy groups tasked with producing creative output in the form of policy recommendations to a federal agency. Results show four modes of group interaction, each with a distinct form of evaluation: brainstorming without evaluation, sequential interactions in which one idea was generated and evaluated, parallel interactions in which several ideas were generated and evaluated, and iterative interactions in which the group evaluated several ideas in reference to the group's goals. Two of the groups in our study followed an evaluation-centered sequence that began with evaluating a small set of ideas. Surprisingly, doing so did not impede the groups' creativity. To explain this, we develop an alternative conceptualization of evaluation as a generative process that shapes and guides collective creativity.

There is increasing interest in the human services field in transformational leadership (Fisher, 2009; Gellis, 2001; Mary, 2005) and the association between this style of leadership and employee engagement, thus impacting the quality of services delivered (Everett & Sitterding, 2011; Mary, 2005). The Sanctuary Model®, a trauma-informed organizational intervention, promotes many elements of the transformational style of leadership, especially the elements of inspiration, optimism, encouragement, honesty, motivation, respect, team-orientation, effective communications, empowerment, reliability, trustworthiness, and empathy (Bloom, 2005, 2011; Smith, 2011). This exploratory, qualitative study examines how social service agency leaders have used a transformational leadership approach to implement the model in two different organizations.

Work teams must increasingly operate in complex environments characterized by multiple external actors beyond team and organizational boundaries. Although previous research demonstrates the importance of boundary spanning activities to team effectiveness, it reveals relatively little about the process of boundary spanning in these environments. In this article, we investigated the processes of boundary spanning across multiple external actors in 10 cross-organizational teams. We identified three sequences for reaching out to external actors: (a) moving inside-out from vertical actors inside the host organization to horizontal actors outside of the host organization, (b) moving outside-in from horizontal actors to vertical, and (c) staying-inside with vertical actors from the host organization. Our observations suggest that inside-out and outside-in sequences were more successful than simply pleasing the host organization. We build on our empirical findings to develop a process theory of how team boundary spanning activities across multiple external actors influence team effectiveness. Our research underscores the importance of a team's interactions with actors in its external environment beyond those in an immediate supervisory role and provides insight into the dynamics of boundary spanning in multi-organizational contexts.