Title

A Time For Everything: How The Timing Of Novel Contributions Influences Project Team Outcomes

Abstract

One of the primary reasons organizations utilize project teams is to encourage members with diverse intellectual resources to produce novel associations that give rise to creative solutions. When creative sparks fly, learning, innovation and superior performance are often the result. However, in this paper we argue that creative sparks often create heat of another sort - frustration resulting from unfocused effort and diminished productivity. Utilizing Gersick's (1988) punctuated equilibrium model of project team development as a theoretical foundation, we argue that the meaning and impact of novel contributions change during a project team's life cycle. Novel contributions are beneficial to a project team early in its development when its primary goals are to learn more about a problem, search for useful information, and articulate tentative solutions. After the midpoint transition, when a team's attention shifts toward executing the proposal and satisfying external stakeholders before a looming deadline, additional attempts to introduce novel ideas are likely to disrupt performance and induce frustration. We develop a model and accompanying research propositions suggesting that the relationship between novel proposals and the value attributed to those proposals is contingent on timing with respect to a project team's midpoint transition. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Publication Date

3-1-2004

Publication Title

Journal of Organizational Behavior

Volume

25

Issue

2

Number of Pages

279-292

Document Type

Review

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1002/job.241

Socpus ID

10944266054 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/10944266054

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS