Team Disparity and Creativity in IT Project Teams - a Creative Synthesis Perspective

Abstract

<p>IT project teams have become the modern way of organizing IT talents. However, despite its importance, the IT project team creativity has been understudied. Drawing on the literature of the creative synthesis perspective, we argue that collective attention, similarity building, and enacting ideas, as three crucial aspects of team creativity development processes, could affect the IT project team creativity. Additionally, we also argue that team disparity, as an understudied aspect of knowledge diversity, could moderate the relationship between creative synthesis processes and the IT project team creativity. We conducted an online survey to verify the conceptual framework and confirmed positive relationships for the hypotheses, as predicted. The paper contributes to the IT project team literature by applying a new theoretical lens based on creative synthesis, as well as providing critical insight into how synthesis processes interact with team knowledge disparity to jointly influence team creativity in IT project teams.</p>