The creativity of culturally diverse teams within the rapid creative process

Abstract

Creativity in culturally diverse teams, especially under time constrains, appears challenging based on the literature on this topic. Yet, many contemporary organizations face pressures with creativity and rapid performance, and they increasingly utilize culturally diverse teams, which are of interest in this study. These trends are intensively present in the international music and non-profit film industries, where culturally diverse songwriting and filmmaking teams are expected to be creative during highly time-constrained song co-writing and filmmaking sessions, conceptualized in this study as the rapid creative process. The overall aim of this doctoral dissertation is, with the help of an empirical study, to improve our understanding of the creativity of culturally diverse teams within the rapid creative process. Two research objectives were set. Firstly, the study seeks to improve understanding of how the team members and stakeholders of the culturally diverse teams perceive the meaning of cultural diversity in team creativity. Secondly, this study seeks to improve understanding of what the team members and stakeholders of the culturally diverse teams perceive as enablers and barriers for the creativity of culturally diverse teams. By investigating its topic within the rapid creative process, the study sheds light on the current changes in working life. In its investigation, the study focuses on the perceptions of the team members and stakeholders of the culturally diverse teams. The philosophical positioning of this study is on pragmatism. A qualitative instrumental case study research strategy was deployed, where the cases, instrumentally, improve understanding of the investigated topic. Two case studies were conducted: the first on culturally diverse songwriting teams (Case A), and the second on culturally diverse filmmaking teams (Case B). The primary research data comprises of 23 thematic interviews conducted as individual, paired and group interviews with 38 interviewees, who were team members (29 interviewees) and stakeholders (9 interviewees). The interview data was analyzed via content analysis. The secondary data, including observations, background interviews, and documents, was utilized to describe the context and the general characteristics of the two cases. The empirical findings of the study show that cultural diversity is perceived to have various meanings in team creativity within the rapid creative process. In Case A, cultural diversity was perceived as a source of culture-bound knowledge of music and music markets, and especially the novelty and uniqueness of the pop songs as well as the appropriateness of the pop songs in the music markets were stressed. In Case B, cultural diversity was perceived as a source of culture-bound informational resources for filmmaking, and it was considered essential for the uniqueness of the short films. In both cases, cultural diversity was also perceived as a source of language challenges which were perceived to consume time and undermine communication within the teams. Thus, the study shows that cultural diversity is perceived to underlie team creativity as simultaneous informational diversity in a team. What seems to be central in this informational diversity are the patterns in which the teams’ informational resources are distributed as well as the qualities of these informational resources. This study also shows the various perceived enablers and barriers for the creativity of culturally diverse teams, which were found to operate at the levels of individual team members, teams, and the teams’ work environments. In particular, the perceived enablers and barriers that operated at the level of teams were found to be central for team creativity in the two cases. The study presents novel enablers and barriers for creativity to the literature, including creative incidents and shadow leadership. Finally, the study yields implications for leaders and practitioners, which can be useful when forming teams from whom creativity is expected within the rapid creative process, and when developing work environments and team leadership to foster the creativity of culturally diverse teams in organizations. It also provokes discussion on applying rapid creative process as a novel form of creative teamwork outside the international music and non-profit film industries.