Search results

This chapter attempts to elucidate the important role that divergent thinking plays in organizational creativity, innovation, and change. We define brainstorming as a systematized method of divergent thinking, review this literature, and advocate for the strategic use of brainstorming to enhance creativity and innovation. We identify contradictory findings in the research literature that have led practitioners and researchers to disregard brainstorming techniques. We suggest that cultural forces embedded in organizations may prevent divergent thinking and brainstorming from becoming established normative organizational processes, thus hampering organizations’ potential for change and innovation. The chapter closes by putting divergent thinking and brainstorming in perspective and provides guidelines for its use.

The questions at the origin of this chapter are: Are children aged 5 years able to become involved in a critical thinking process, which implies a certain degree of abstraction and decentering? To what extent can an approach centered on philosophical dialogue among peers contribute to this development? The chapter describes a study of the exchanges in two groups of children aged 5 years. One group had experience with the philosophical dialogue tool, the Philosophy for Children approach, while the other group had no such experience. The analysis grid was the operationalized model of the developmental process of dialogical critical thinking, as revisited by Daniel and Gagnon, which includes four thinking modes (logical, creative, responsible, and metacognitive) and six epistemological perspectives (egocentricity, post-egocentricity, pre-relativism, relativism, post-relativism, intersubjectivity). Results of the analysis showed that 65% of the experimental group's interventions were situated in relativistic perspectives and 35% in egocentric perspectives, whereas 60% of the control group's interventions were situated in egocentric perspectives and 40% in relativistic perspectives.

A growing literature has recognized the importance of mental simulation (e.g., imagining alternatives to reality) in sparking creativity. In this chapter, we examine how counterfactual thinking, or imagining alternatives to past outcomes, affects group creativity. We explore these effects by articulating a model that considers the influence of counterfactual thinking on both the cognitive and social processes known to impact group creative performance. With this framework, we aim to stimulate research on group creativity from a counterfactual perspective.

This qualitative study investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. It examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, and rules on the group's development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Data were collected over the course of a year from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews and then analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks, enacting group roles and rules that facilitated sharing information. The functions of their messages focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.

This chapter makes the case for imparting effective project management training and collaborative skills for information professionals. The authors identify the challenges of collaborative project work in online environments by reviewing the relevant project management literature within the library and information science (LIS) discipline and discussing the role of LIS schools in addressing project management and collaborative skills for information professionals.

The literature review revealed a significant lack of project management and collaborative skills among LIS professionals. However, most LIS schools are still falling short when it comes to offering project management courses on a regular basis. The authors examined the challenges of teamwork in online environments, identified project management strategies and approaches for successful teamwork, and proposed guidelines for strategic project management education for information professionals. It is recommended that information professionals should have the skills to prepare a team contract, develop a project schedule, create mechanisms for transparency and accountability, and use effective communication strategies through project management techniques.

In addition to reviewing the relevant literature on project management within LIS, and the challenges of teamwork in online environments, the authors analyzed the relevance of some collaborative concepts and frameworks that might be useful in managing collaborative projects. In particular, the implications of Tuckman’s (1965) team progression theory, lessons from Harvey’s (1988) Abilene paradox, and de Bono’s (1989) six thinking hats method were analyzed and discussed in managing collaborative projects.

By obtaining effective project management and collaborative skills, LIS professionals will be able to better meet the demands of contemporary libraries and information organizations.

In today's knowledge-based economy, the ability to produce highly novel and practical ideas is critical to an organization's survival. This paper draws upon social perspectives of creativity (Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003) and the vital role of recombinant information in creative development (Barron & Harrington, 1981; Hargadon, 2003) to explore information exchange probabilities; exchanges among group members who are deep-level similar fosters incremental creative potential while information exchanges among group members who are deep-level dissimilar fosters radical creative potential. The dynamics of attraction suggest group members are most likely to interact with people who are least likely to facilitate radical creativity. Using a computer simulation we examine how proximity may be used to facilitate information exchanges among deep-level diverse group members to increase the potential for radical creativity. Results suggest the use of proximity to create strong ties among deep-level dissimilar group members may facilitate radical creativity in groups.

Using a managerial cognition lens, we investigate the organizational design issues facing multinational corporation (MNC) managers. We apply concepts hitherto untested in the international management (IM) literature to a longitudinal study of reconfiguration efforts within a large, Asian MNC. We focus on how organizational design outcomes can be affected through mental interventions that provoke changes in senior executives’ mental representations of what the MNC is and can be to achieve a strategic redirection and redesign. We draw on extensive interview and other qualitative data. Our study contributes to the literatures on MNC design and to our understanding of the important, but largely neglected, micro-foundational role of cognition in IM. This field research on executive judgment and decision-making in real time offers unique insights into the dynamics of MNC design.