Affect and Creativity in Work Teams

This chapter begins with a review of research findings on affect and its effects at the level of individual creativity, and follows up by describing the research that has extended individual phenomena to the group level, including discussion of the dynamic nature of creativity in groups. It explores the relationship between positive and negative affective states and creativity at individual and group levels of analysis. The chapter discusses mean positive and negative group affective tone (GAT) in teams, as well as diversity of affect within teams. S. G. Barsade and A. P. Knight suggest that the detrimental effects of affective diversity may be explained in terms of a similarity-attraction perspective, in which people prefer to work with others who share similar attributes with themselves. Team members’ affective dissimilarity may thus produce a sense of interpersonal strain or stress between team members, thereby hindering group functioning.