Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-Analytic Integration

Mullen, Brian; Johnson, Craig; Salas, Eduardo

doi:10.1207/s15324834basp1201_1

Cited by 639 publications

(444 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Most people believe that groups outperform equivalent sets of non-interacting individuals, or what Paulus et al (1993) has termed, the "illusion of group productivity." However, many studies show that working individually is more efficient than collaborating (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987;Mullen, Johnson, & Salas, 1991), termed "group process loss" (Steiner, 1972), while a few studies have found a process gain effect (Collins & Guetzkow, 1964;Laughlin, 2002). All of these group studies have taken place in laboratory settings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation in a professional engineering team

Yılmaz

Daly

Christian

et al. 2013

International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

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Generating novel ideas is a challenging part of engineering design, especially when the design task has been undertaken for an extended period of time. How can experienced designers develop new ideas for familiar problems? A tool called Design Heuristicsprovides strategies that support engineers in considering more, and more different, concepts during idea generation. Design Heuristics have been shown to help novice engineers create a set of more diverse and creative candidate concepts. In this case study, we extended this approach to a group of professional engineers who had worked on a specific product line for many years. In a workshop format, a small group of engineers worked with the heuristics in two separate sessions and generated ideas collaboratively. Video recordings were analyzed to reveal how the heuristics were used to stimulate new designs for their product line. We found that Design Heuristics bring order in ideas and elaboration on ideas, perhaps through coordinating effort on idea evaluation, increasing capacity to improve the ideas of others, and facilitating interaction between participants. This case study shows using Design Heuristics can assist even expert engineers to increase the variety of concepts generated, resulting in a larger set of ideas to consider. Keywords engineering design, idea generation, teamwork in design Disciplines Industrial and Product Design Comments This is a manuscript of an article from Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation within a professional engineering teamGenerating novel ideas is a challenging part of engineering design, especially when the design task has been undertaken for an extended period of time. How can experienced designers develop new ideas for familiar problems? A tool called Design Heuristics provides strategies that support engineers in considering more, and more different, concepts during idea generation. Design Heuristics are strategies for idea generation based on empirical analyses of idea generation from professional and student engineers and industrial designers working on a wide variety of product designs. Design Heuristics have been shown to help novice engineers create a set of more diverse and creative candidate concepts. In this case study, we extended this approach to a group of professional engineers who had worked on a specific product line for many years. In a workshop format, a small group of engineers worked with the heuristics in two separate sessions, and generated ideas collaboratively. Video recordings were analyzed to reveal how the heuristics were used to stimulate new designs for their product line. This case study shows using Design Heuristics can assist even expert engineers to increase the variety of concepts generated, resulting in a larger set of ideas to consider.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation in a professional engineering team

Yılmaz

Daly

Christian

et al. 2013

International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Mosier and Skitka (1996) outlined three possible reasons (hypotheses) why people inappropriately use automation: (1) cognitive miser, (2) authority, and (3) diffusion of responsibility. These three hypotheses parallel three processes: cognitive, social, and motivational, which have been implicated as the causes of productivity loss found in groups (e.g., Mullen, Johnson, & Salas, 1991). Since many researchers have considered a human-computer "team" to be a group in which one member happens not to be human (e.g., Bowers, Oser, Salas, & Cannon-Bowers, 1996), we hypothesize that these same three processes can lead to sub-optimal performance in human-computer teams.…”

Section: Framework Of Automation Usementioning

confidence: 79%

Operational Reasoning: The Overlooked Aspect of Operational Art in Peace Operations

Stewart¹

2001

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Although dramatic increases in the use of automation in recent years have occurred across society, research has found that human operators often under-use (disuse) and overly rely on (misuse) automated aids (Parasuraman & Riley, 1997). A general framework of automation use, which proposes that cognitive, social, and motivational processes may lead to productivity loss of humancomputer teams, is developed, described, and defended with anecdotal and experimental findings. More specifically, automation use is predicted to be affected by the difference between the reliability of the automated aid and the reliability of manual operation, task difficulty, the number of tasks, intere~t in the task, fatigue, cognitive overhead, the rewards for successful performance, the penalties for unsuccessful performance, and several cognitive biases. Suggestions for future research are briefly discussed.ii

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“…Most people believe they can contribute more creative ideas Relational Affirmation in Teams 7 when they work in teams than when they work alone (Stroebe, Diehl, and Abakoumkin, 1992;Pauhus et al, 1993). Despite this prevalent belief that team interactions will stimulate creative thinking, research on brainstorming shows that pooling ideas from people working alone leads to more creative ideas than having the same people generate ideas in a team setting (Taylor, Berry, and Block, 1958;Lamm and Trommsdorff, 1973;Diehl and Stroebe, 1987;Mullen, Johnson, and Salas, 1991;Brown and Paulus, 2002). In this section, we first review research that points to team members' concerns about social acceptance as a key reason for team productivity loss, and we identify feelings of social worth as a psychological mechanism that can override such concerns.…”

Section: Theoretical Model and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preparing the Self for Team Entry: How Relational Affirmation Improves Team Performance

Lee

Gino²,

Cable

et al. 2016

SSRN Journal

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Working in teams often leads to productivity loss because the need to feel accepted prevents individual members from making a unique contribution to the team in terms of the information or perspective they can offer. Drawing on self-affirmation theory, we propose that pre-team relational self-affirmation can prepare individuals to contribute to team creative performance more effectively. We theorize that relationally-affirming one's self-views increases general feelings of being socially valued by others, leading to better information exchange and creative performance. In a first study, we found that teams in which members affirmed their best selves prior to team formation (i.e., by soliciting and receiving narratives that highlight one's positive impact on close others) outperformed teams that did not do so on a creative problem-solving task. In the second experiment, conducted using virtual teams, we show that pre-team relational self-affirmation leads to heightened feelings of social worth, which in turn explains the effect of the treatment on the team's ability to exchange information.Keywords: relational self-affirmation; team entry; team creative performance; information exchange; social worth. Relational Affirmation in Teams 3Preparing the Self for Team Entry: How Relational Affirmation Improves Team PerformanceEffective communication is a key feature of a team's capabilities (Eisenhardt and Martin, 2000;Gardner, Gino, and Staats, 2012). Unfortunately, as members are introduced to a team, one critical issue that may impede effective team communication is each member's need to feel accepted by the others (Wittenbaum and Stasser, 1996;Gruenfeld et al., 1996). The need to feel accepted can lead individual members to prioritize fitting in over contributing unique information and adding maximum value to the team. For example, teams are biased toward repeating previously-mentioned shared information, as opposed to sharing unique information, because repetition helps members appear "cognitively central and thus task competent" (Wittenbaum, Hubbell, and Zuckerman, 1999; p. 968). In addition, team members are more likely to share socially-endorsed information within the team if they believe the information to be useful to the team as compared to information that has not been socially-validated (Littlepage, Perdue, and Fuller, 2012). Thus, individual team members' need for social acceptance may hinder the team's ability to share and integrate information in order to accomplish their task.One remedy to this problem is for members to invest time after team formation, to highlight their differences in ideas, background and perspectives. As evidenced in a qualitative study of diverse teams by Ely and Thomas (2001), openly discussing the unique qualities of different team members and integrating diverse perspectives allowed individuals to feel valued and respected. The team members were able to apply their differences in knowledge, and the perspectives associated with their unique identities, to the task at hand...

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Productivity Loss in Brainstorming Groups: A Meta-Analytic Integration

Cited by 639 publications

References 22 publications

Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation in a professional engineering team

Can experienced designers learn from new tools? A case study of idea generation in a professional engineering team

Operational Reasoning: The Overlooked Aspect of Operational Art in Peace Operations

Preparing the Self for Team Entry: How Relational Affirmation Improves Team Performance

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