Understanding how to stimulate individual, team and organizational creativity: The role of cognitive styles, faultlines and co-creation

Creativity or idea generation is a vital source of progress and innovation. Academics, policy makers, and practitioners therefore pay substantial attention to this phenomenon. In this dissertation, we want to increase our understanding of creativity in two ways. First, we aim to enrich the understanding of the phenomenon of creativity at the individual and team level by delving deeper into how the particular aspect of cognitive styles influences creativity. We frame this part as the more ‘exploitative’ part of this dissertation because this research is embedded in a long and rich tradition of studying creativity of individuals and teams. Second, we aim to enrich the understanding of the less studied phenomenon of creativity at the organizational level. We label this part of the dissertation as the more ‘explorative’ part because we examine the impact of particular internal and external factors on the ability of organizations to generate creative outcomes. To address our research objectives, we rely on both experimental research designs to detect causal relationships in a controlled setting and survey data on SME companies.