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Other Sociology Commons

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Selected Works

2010

Divergent thinking

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Other Sociology

Individualism-Collectivism And Group Creativity, Jack A. Goncalo, Barry M. Staw May 2010

Individualism-Collectivism And Group Creativity, Jack A. Goncalo, Barry M. Staw

Jack Goncalo

Current research in organizational behavior suggests that organizations should adopt collectivistic values because they promote cooperation and productivity, while individualistic values should be avoided because they incite destructive conflict and opportunism. In this paper, we highlight one possible benefit of individualistic values that has not previously been considered. Because individualistic values can encourage uniqueness, such values might be useful when creativity is a desired outcome. Although we hypothesize that individualistic groups should be more creative than collectivistic groups, we also consider an important competing hypothesis: Given that collectivistic groups are more responsive to norms, they might be more creative than …


Hidden Consequences Of The Group Serving Bias: Causal Attributions And The Quality Of Group Decision Making, Jack Goncalo, Michelle M. Duguid May 2010

Hidden Consequences Of The Group Serving Bias: Causal Attributions And The Quality Of Group Decision Making, Jack Goncalo, Michelle M. Duguid

Jack Goncalo

A long stream of research in attribution theory suggests that groups are biased toward attributing their success to factors that are internal to their group. However, the existing research has confounded two types of attributions that are both internal to the group, but theoretically distinct: (1) Attributions that differentiate between the contributions made by each individual group member and (2) attributions that focus on the group as a whole. This dichotomy is important because, drawing on theories of social influence, we predict that different types of attributions will have different consequences for the quality of group decision making. In experiment …