1 Affective Ingenuity: Linking Shared Emotions and Team Creativity Zhike Lei ESMT European School of Management and Technology Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock Technische Universität Braunschweig I. Abstract Creative activity, heralded as the key to enduring economic advantage, appears to be an emotionally charged event. Despite advancement in the literature on affective influences on individual creativity and increasing attention to team creativity and innovation, there is a dearth of research on the relationship between emotional contagion and team creativity. This study aims to address current empirical and theoretical gaps by explicitly exploring how emotions are shared and converged in work teams and how this sharing process affects individual and team creativity. We collected both quantitative and qualitative data from 28 work teams meeting regularly in the production departments of two medium-sized German companies to examine our research questions. We describe our research design, suggest testing models, and present major challenges to our data. Keywords: Emotions; Team/ dynamics, processes, and outcomes; Creativity, Innovation & Improvisation; Qualitative II. Overview of Research Background and Research Questions Creativity – coming up with fresh ideas for improving and changing products, services and processes so as to better achieve an organization’s goals – has been heralded as the key to enduring economic advantage. Creative activity appears to be an affectively charged event, in which complex cognitive processes are shaped by, co-occur with, and shape emotional experiences (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005; Barsade & Gibson, 2007). The biographies, letters, and journals of well-known creative individuals such as Vincent Van Gogh and Virginia Woolf abound with emotional drama. Popular literature often describes individuals’ affective experiences as an ingredient of their creativity. For example, Mozart claimed that pleasant moods were most conducive to his creativity: “When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say, travelling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly” (Vernon, 1970: 55). While past breakthroughs sometimes come from a single genius like da Vinci and Thomas Edison, the reality of business today is that most innovations draw on many contributions, and much of the innovation work is done in teams. Consider the examples of 3M, Google, and