The Effects of Problem Structure and Team Diversity on Brainstorming Effectiveness - HEC Paris - École des hautes études commerciales de Paris Accéder directement au contenu
Article Dans Une Revue Management Science Année : 2009

The Effects of Problem Structure and Team Diversity on Brainstorming Effectiveness

Résumé

Since Osborn's Applied Imagination book in 1953 (Osborn, A. F. 1953. Applied Imagination: Principles and Procedures of Creative Thinking. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York), the effectiveness of brainstorming has been widely debated. While some researchers and practitioners consider it the standard idea generation and problem-solving method in organizations, part of the social science literature has argued in favor of nominal groups, i.e., the same number of individuals generating solutions in isolation. In this paper, we revisit this debate, and we explore the implications that the underlying problem structure and the team diversity have on the quality of the best solution as obtained by the different group configurations. We build on the normative search literature of new product development, and we show that no group configuration dominates. Therefore, nominal groups perform better in specialized problems, even when the factors that affect the solution quality exhibit complex interactions (problem complexity). In cross-functional problems, the brainstorming group exploits the competence diversity of its participants to attain better solutions. However, their advantage vanishes for extremely complex problems.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-00491685 , version 1 (14-06-2010)

Identifiants

Citer

Svenja Sommer, Stylianos Kavadias. The Effects of Problem Structure and Team Diversity on Brainstorming Effectiveness. Management Science, 2009, Vol.55, n°12, pp.1899-1913. ⟨10.1287/mnsc.1090.1079⟩. ⟨hal-00491685⟩

Collections

HEC CNRS
204 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More