Creativity in a 24h-long Virtual Design Team

Creativity has traditionally constituted an important topic in organizations and its importance seems to have increased as we have been moving from traditional, physically collocated to virtual, geographically dispersed team configurations. Our study aims to bridge this gap by examining the case of creativity in virtual design teams (VDTs)—that is, virtual teams in the context of engineering design. We see design as a collaborative activity and use it as the empirical context in this study. We report on the findings from a case study with a temporary, 24h-long, VDT, which examined the relationship between creativity and virtuality. We employed multiple data collection methods, capturing most of the 24h, (i.e. interviews, non-participant observation, videos, design outputs, written communications), and analysed our data thematically following an interpretive approach and by using the ‘team’ as our unit of analysis. Our study extends prior knowledge on creativity in virtual teams by (a) positioning creativity within the VDT lifecycle; and by (b) elucidating the relationship between creativity and the unique characteristics of virtuality. We infer that boundaries, language, geographical dispersion, subgrouping, and computer-mediated communication are associated with creativity in the VDT context; and explain how they influence it.