Flourishing in Teams: Developing Creativity and Innovation

Team working offers a powerful and ubiquitous strategy for managing organizational change, and team innovation is often the manifestation of teams’ efforts to cope successfully with the changes in their work environments. Developing team innovation will enhance an organization’s ability to redirect and focus resources effectively, appropriately and more quickly than its competitors, because it enables all members of the organization to respond to the demands for change, and to make appropriate changes at a local level. In order to manage and implement change we therefore need to understand how to develop innovative teams. In this chapter, we review relevant research and present twelve principles that theorists and practitioners can use as guides for understanding and promoting innovation in teams. Innovation can be defined as ‘... the intentional introduction and application within a job, work team or organization of ideas, processes, products or procedures which are new to that job, work team or organization and which are designed to benefit the job, the work team or the organization.’ (West and Farr, 1990, p. 9). Innovation is a two-component non-linear process, encompassing both creativity and innovation implementation. At the outset of the process, creativity dominates, to be superseded later by innovation implementation processes. Innovation represents a particular category of change – it is intentional, designed to benefit, and new to the unit of adoption. If a change incorporates these three elements, according to this definition, it is innovation.