Coordinating Quickened Creativity: Leveraging Creative Engagement Differentiation In Time-constrained Teams

Abstract

Teams are often expected to generate creative solutions under severe time constraints, yet research offers limited insight into how they can coordinate creative processes effectively in such settings. We propose that time-constrained teams can achieve creativity through a coordination strategy we term creative engagement differentiation (CED) or the extent to which team members specialize in different creative activities. When time is scarce, creative teams do not have time for each member to engage in each necessary creative process. So, they benefit by dividing creative activities among members. We further examine the conditions that drive CED emergence, proposing that teams with greater expertise diversity and a well-developed transactive memory system (TMS) are more likely to use CED. We test these ideas in two complementary studies. Study 1 (a laboratory experiment) manipulates CED and time pressure to test the causal effect of CED on team creativity. Study 2, a multi-source field study of teams in a high-profile hackathon, validates this effect in a real-world time-constrained setting and examines the conditions that predict CED emergence. Together, these findings address how time-constrained teams coordinate creative processes to achieve creativity quickly and when they are most likely to do so.

Keywords: creative engagement differentiation, team creativity, creative problem-solving, time constraints, team coordination, expertise diversity, transactive memory systems