Creativity and Constraint: Exploring the Role of Constraint in the Creative Processes of New Product and Technology Development Teams.

Abstract

Research on creativity in organizations has revealed a variety of important paradoxes; paradoxes that some have argued are fundamental to the nature of creativity itself. One such paradox is the tension between freedom and constraint in the creative process. Whereas theorists have described the ideal creative process as unstructured, open-ended, and free of external limitations, others have found that creative individuals and teams can benefit from constraints. The purpose of this dissertation is to make sense of this tension in the literature by investigating the ways in which constraint both inhibits and enhances work team creativity. Conducting inductive field research with four product and technology development teams in a multinational corporation known for innovation, I develop a typology of constraints affecting creative teams and address the research questions “When (under what circumstances) do constraints affect team creativity?” and “How (through what processes) do constraints affect team creativity?” This research uncovers a variety of salient constraints that can be organized into two broad categories – process constraints and product constraints – suggesting that these types of constraints play markedly different roles in the team creative process. This study also reveals that under different circumstances, these constraints affect team creativity differently. Specifically, enduring patterns of team social dynamics, characterized as enabling dynamics and disabling dynamics, were shown to play a vital role in how teams interpret and respond to constraint, and therefore whether constraints were likely to inhibit or enhance team creativity. Teams experiencing the right kinds of constraints in the right environments, and which saw opportunity in constraint, benefitted creatively from them. The study makes explicit the underlying social psychological mechanisms by which constraints inhibit or enhance team creativity. The results of this research challenge the assumption that constraints kill creativity, demonstrating instead that for teams able to accept and embrace them, there is freedom in constraint.

This dissertation contributes to creativity literature by examining an understudied tension, articulating a theoretical perspective that makes sense of disparate findings on the topic, heeding calls for more creativity research at the team level, and developing creativity theory grounded specifically in the organizational context.