CHAPTER 13 Team Creativity and Innovation: The Effect of Group Composition, Social Processes, and Cognition Rani Reiter... P alman 1 , Ben Wigert 2 , and Triparna de Vreede 2 lUniversity of Nebraska at Omaha, Department of Psychology and Center for Collaboration Science, Omaha, NE; 2University of Nebraska at Omaha, Department of Psychology, Omaha, NE Much of the early work on organizational creativity focused on the individual, and the role of individual differences in explaining creative production. Within this approach, teams were viewed as providing the social context that facilitates or inhibits individual creativity (Amabile, 1996; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). While earlier work neglected the team as the unit of analysis, recently the direct role of teams in the development of creative prod- ucts or ideas has been the focus of more research. There are several reasons for the emergence of interest in team creativity and innovation. As a result of changes in technology, increased globalizations and competition, and a knowl- edge-based economy, the problems facing organizations are so complex that a single individ- ual does not possess all the knowledge necessary to solve these problems, and teams have been viewed as the solution to this problem (Kozlowski & Bell, 2008). These same issues have also been suggested as underlying the need for creativity and innovation in organizations (Ford & Gioia, 1995; Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004; West, Hirst, Richter, & Shipton, 2004). A second reason for the emergence of the interest in teams is that they provide additional per- formance benefits, such as access to diverse information, diverse perspectives, and the abil- ity to capitalize on the varied skills of the team members (Tesluk, Farr, & Klein, 1997). As a result, reliance on teams has increased steadily in organizations (Edmondson & Roloff, 2009). Handbook of Organizational Creatidcy. DOl: m 10/6iB978-0-!2-374714-3.COOI3-6 295 © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.