While usually argued to be fostering creativity, the effect of knowledge depth and breadth on creativity is actually mixed. We take a dynamic approach to the knowledge-creativity relationship and argue that the effect of knowledge depth and knowledge breadth is likely to be contingent on career age. We propose that individuals' knowledge structures become increasingly rigid as career age grows and that because of this, knowledge depth and breadth have different effects on creativity at different points of the career. More specifically, we hypothesize that knowledge depth is more beneficial for creativity in earlier stages of one's career, when creators need to increase the complexity of knowledge structures, while knowledge breadth is more beneficial in later stages, when flexibility is most needed. We test and find support for our hypotheses in a longitudinal study set in the context of the Hollywood animation industry, a setting characterized by the presence of a variety of creators involved in knowledge-intensive activities. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed. We extend our gratitude to associate editor Martine R. Haas and four anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback throughout the review process. We also wish to thank Jill Perry-Smith and Giuseppe Soda for their comments on early drafts of this paper, and Gino Cattani for his suggestions on the statistical analysis. We also thank the seminar and conference participants at London Business School,
Why, during a decision between new alternatives, do people bias their evaluations of information to support a tentatively preferred option? The authors test the following 3 decision process goals as the potential drivers of such distortion of information: (a) to reduce the effort of evaluating new information, (b) to increase the separation between alternatives, and (c) to achieve consistency between old and new units of information. Two methods, the nonconscious priming of each goal and assessing the ambient activation levels of multiple goals, reveal that the goal of consistency drives information distortion. Results suggest the potential value of combining these methods in studying the dynamics of multiple, simultaneously active goals.
International audienceWe examine the effects of conflict and conflict asymmetry on creativity in interdisciplinary teams. Testing our hypotheses on teams working on graduate-level nanobiotechnology projects, we found task conflict to have a positive relationship with creativity whereas relationship conflict had a negative relationship with creativity. Our results also revealed that relationship conflict asymmetry had a positive effect on creativity. Examining the two components of creativity separately, we found that relationship conflict asymmetry explained variance in the novelty component, whereas task conflict, team size, and functional diversity explained variance in the usefulness component
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.