Complexiteit, Creativiteit, Teams. Een exploratie van taakcomplexiteit en creatieve processen in projectteams

This doctoral dissertation focuses on two crucial concepts in current organisational practice and research: complexity and creativity. We investigate these issues in the context of one of the most popular investigated work formats in contemporary organisations: project teams. It is often assumed that project teams are better at tackling complex tasks than individuals, since a team has access to its members’ diverse bodies of knowledge and experiences. What exactly it is that makes a task complex, is however not clear. Furthermore, teams are often proposed as fertile grounds for the creativity that is assumed to be necessary to effectively deal with complex tasks. This doctoral dissertation entails five studies that are structured around these two parts: in part 1 (Study 1 and 2) we explore and clarify the concept of task complexity (TC) in project teams; in part 2 (Study 3, 4 and 5) we focus on processes of creativity and learning in project teams. The first part of this work thus focuses on deepening our understanding of the concept of task complexity. Our first study aims to deepen our understanding of (TC) and how it is investigated in teams. This is done in two steps: based on a systematic review of review studies on TC, we construct a ten-dimensional task complexity framework. A panel of experts that participated in a Q-sorting study corroborates the structure of this framework. Subsequently, we investigate how TC is investigated in teams by means of a systematic review of the literature. We conclude that research on TC in teams is mainly based on different conceptualisations and is as a result not comparable. In our second study, we investigate the practical relevance of our ten-dimensional model: by means of a Delphi procedure, we investigated the relative importance (or weight) of each TC dimension for overall TC. The second part of this dissertation focuses on specific team processes that can support team creativity and effectiveness. In study 3 – the first study of part two – we investigate the conceptual and empirical differences between creative and learning processes in teams. Building on this, our fourth study investigates the interrelation between creative and learning processes, and the effect of this interrelation on team effectiveness. Furthermore, we investigate the role of the team’s social context for the occurrence of such processes. We found that there is an extensive overlap between facilitating team learning and team creative processes, although these processes remain important for team effectiveness. Furthermore, team creative efficacy and psychological safety are very strong predictors for team processes and effectiveness to emerge. However, the strongest predictor in our model is the degree to which teams have a shared mental model about their creative efficacy and psychological safety. In our fifth and final study we focus on the interrelation of team creative efficacy and team processes over time. Results show that there is a bidirectional effect between both variables, but that this effect changes over time. Furthermore, this study confirms the relevance of studying the level of agreement on e.g. creative efficacy among team members. The degree to which teams are on the same page is supportive for the emergence of team processes. Overall, this doctoral dissertation provides several valuable insights for theory and practice, on which we elaborate in our final chapter, the epilogue.status: publishe