Prima donna alert! Great brains don't always guarantee success, says Cambridge Judge

Its deep-studied research finds an inverted U-curve between the number of creative team members and innovative output.

While it's often widely assumed that a higher proportion of creative team members translates into more innovative team performance, the Judge report shows that it’s not that straightforward.

Simply aggregating all team members’ creativity fails to take into account the social and professional interactions among team members – as such dynamics can often be the key to whether teams’ creative output is fostered or hindered. Creative people can be prima donnas who are unable or unwilling to follow team norms and implement ideas in a disciplined manner, Judge argues.

“The traditional assumption with regard to building teams and creativity was the building-block view, that the more creative people you put into a team the more you get out, but we show that it’s not that simple,” says study co-author Prithviraj Chattopadhyay, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at Cambridge Judge Business School. “Creative people can be chaotic, so there are opposing views to this building-block view, and our research aims to bridge the gap between those views in a practical and useful way.”

The study finds that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the proportion of creative team members and team innovation: creativity, in terms of registered patents, increases up to a certain intermediate point as the proportion of creatives on a team rises, but creativity then declines if that creative team proportion gets bigger.

Professor Chattopadhyay says there is little doubt that creativity is essential for companies to innovate in ways that refresh their product lines and stay ahead of the competition, and the novel ideas of such creators hold big sway within firms. So it’s been widely assumed that a higher proportion of creative team members translates into more innovative team performance.

Yet this so-called maximisation fallacy has clear flaws, he says, because in simply aggregating all team members’ creativity it fails to take into account the social and professional interactions among team members – and these dynamics can often be the key to whether teams’ creative output is fostered or hindered.

As extensive research has pointed out, creative people can be prima donnas who are unable or unwilling to follow team norms and implement ideas in a disciplined manner. Although the tendency to break rules and engage in extensive exploration may foster creativity, they may also worsen intrateam co-ordination and increase team conflict.

“When an R & D team is overcrowded with creative members, the increased complexity of co-ordinating their creative ideas and higher levels of conflict may adversely affect their team’s innovative performance,” the research says.

Breaking new ground, the research goes on to examine how participative management (often centered around enhancing job characteristics and granting more autonomy to team members) and pay dispersion (in which work of certain team members receives higher monetary reward) affect this U-shaped curve, as previous research has not focused on the joint impact of team attributes and such human resource management practices.

The Judge study upshot can be summed up thus: “We found an inverted U-shaped relationship between the proportion of creative team members and team innovation when the levels of participative management and pay dispersion are high. We found the relationship between the proportion of creative team members and team innovation to be linear and positive mostly when the levels of participation or pay dispersion are low.

“Overall, these results support our key propositions that higher proportions of creative team members do not always lead to higher levels of team innovative performance, and that HRM practices implemented to stimulate innovation may backfire unless they are considered alongside team composition.

“We suggest that managers think carefully about the combination of initiatives they undertake to boost innovation, instead of blindly following the dictum that more initiatives undertaken to boost creativity is always better.”

Prior research by Prithviraj found that teams are most likely to function best when their membership includes people who are expert in the team’s core function and offer key ideas, as well as others who play supporting roles that co-ordinate activities and strengthen processes through which the team achieves its desired outcome.

Drawing on this, the more recent research by Prithviraj argues that “teams with too many creative experts may function poorly because the creative members often engage in competition for limited resources and, in so doing, increase team conflict and inhibit team co-ordination.”

As for pay dispersion: while this can play a critical role in boosting employee motivation, differentiating between high and low performers can also encourage a focus on personal goals at the cost of overall team performance. Previous studies on sports have borne this out, showing, for example, that high pay dispersion in football is related to more individual actions such as runs and dribbles rather than co-operative plays like passes.

The research by Prithviraj uses data from South Korea around the time of the Asian financial crisis in the early-to-mid 2000s, when companies led by tech giants Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics led a war for talent that focused on recruiting talented workers rather than the traditional seniority-based system of labour.

The data, from the Human Capital Corporate Panel (HCCP) collected by the Korea Research Institute of Vocational Education & Training, assessed team members’ job competency for creativity based on several categorisations.

This proportion of creative team members was assessed and underlined that balance matters when assembling teams. “The practical implication is that you’ve got to think about who you include on a team, as more isn’t necessarily better,” says Prithviraj. “To have a proper team you need to recognise the team’s strengths and weaknesses from an individual and group perspective.”