The Emergence of Team Creativity: A Social Network Perspective

Viewing teams as evolving networks of intertwined social relations, the social network perspective has been increasingly adopted to understand the emergence of team creativity in the past decades. This network lens enables creativity scholars to accurately depict how creative inputs embedded in team structures combine to take effects in collective processes and eventually form team creative outcomes in a dynamic fashion. Yet applications of this network view in team creativity research are scarce, and not closely linked to the development of social network theories. Therefore, after introducing the core concepts and principles of social network theories, this chapter reviews the status quo of team creativity research in terms of three components—creative inputs, team structure, and creative processes from a social network perspective. Furthermore, this chapter puts forward three key directions for future studies on the emergence of team creativity—specialization, integration, and dynamics.