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LET’S DANCE! ELASTIC COORDINATION IN CREATIVE GROUP WORK: A QUALITATIVE…
LET’S DANCE! ELASTIC COORDINATION IN CREATIVE GROUP WORK: A QUALITATIVE STUDY OF MODERN DANCERS - Harrison and Rouse
Group work is another popular tactic for fostering creativity, guided by the assumption that bringing together unique perspectives and opinions can catalyze new insights and novel combinations of knowledge
Group work always implies some form of coordination. Creative group work requires that group members generate ideas, share their ideas with one another, listen and focus on one another’s ideas, and then generate new associations, building on one another’s ideas to integrate them into a truly novel solution
Autonomy and group work are arguably two of the most potent tactics for generating creativity in organizations, but, when combined together, they might cancel each other out. That is, providing individuals within a group with too much freedom can ruin the group’s ability to coordinate work, thereby canceling out the benefits of both tactics
Autonomy is important in creative work because it allows individuals to investigate ideas that are intrinsically motivating to them, leading to a more thorough exploration
Kim and Lee’s (1995) study of 80 R&D teams revealed that autonomy within the team had a negative relationship with team performance, which included measures of innovativeness.
Barker (1993) found that groups given autonomy chose to restrict their freedom, suggesting the need to attend to how groups use constraints in relation to autonomy.
Constraints can motivate individuals to seek novel solutions by forcing them to avoid using techniques that led to previous creative outcomes (Stokes, 2006). Often, under conditions of complete free- dom to explore, people revert to familiar, “tried and true” responses to alleviate the cognitive complex- ity of too many options (Elsbach & Hargadon, 2006).
Autonomy is important in creative work because it allows individuals to investigate ideas that are intrinsically motivating to them, leading to a more thorough exploration (Amabile, 1983, 1988).
By focusing on coordination, our study reveals that imposing a practice or process (like brainstorming or design thinking) is not enough, but that group members rely on flexible boundaries that they can adapt moment to moment to support working together or individually.
RESEARCH
When we began observing modern dance rehearsals, we were surprised by what seemed to be a constant stream of questions near the beginning of
each rehearsal.
Yet the dancers continued to impose their own constraints within that extremely limited space. By making these expectations explicit, the dancers are actively imposing constraints on their options to dance in different ways. By relying on the use of “we” and “our” in the questions the group members acknowledge the shared nature of the constraints, foreshadowing the fact that, at some point in the future, the group members will need to integrate after they have separately explored the now-constrained space.
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Parsing solutions: interactions in which group members attempt to steer the group from a multiplicity of options to a solution.
The dancers feel that this disrupts the overall message of the dance and point out how the solution creates new problems. In noting, “I think I was getting a little too excited,” the choreographer recognizes that it is important for her to limit her autonomy, not freely expressing new ideas, so that the group can begin to cohere around an idea.
In the end, the dancers guide the choreographer away from the new proposal and back to the original concept.