On the emergence of collective psychological ownership in new creative teams

摘要

In teams that are formed for driving creative work, scientific discovery, new product development and entrepreneurship, collective ownership makes members invest collaborative effort, take risks and make personal sacrifices to advance the team's creative output. Shared activities during formative years bring the sense of collective ownership. The formative period of many creative teams, however, may make it particularly difficult for team members to experience such shared activities. In creative teams, the psychological ownership is concentrated in the person who developed the initial idea. This leads to asymmetry in ownership during formative phases and an initial obstacle to the success of the creative team. The purpose of this research is to develop and test a theoretical model of how collective ownership emerges in creative teams that originated from a single person's idea. The study identifies the basic tension that stems from this initial asymmetry. It is proposed that creative leads can navigate this tension by enacting behaviors that that signal ownership and demarcate boundaries to others. They simultaneously foster the unifying force of team identification and avert the divisive force of team conflict, thus enabling the emergence of collective ownership. The proposed model was tested through a quantitative study of 79 newly formed creative teams participating in a renowned entrepreneurship competition. The findings are elaborated using a qualitative study of 27 creative teams participating in a university start-up launch course. The results demonstrate interpersonal processes that may facilitate or inhibit a collaborative creative effort from surviving beyond its earliest days of inception. Creative leads can actively manage the degree to which new team members identify with the team and how much they become embroiled in conflict. The study also found that creative teams characterized by this initial asymmetry are vulnerable to conflict because team members are susceptible to to infringing on the creative lead's territory. This divisive conflict blocks the shared experiences that enable collective ownership to emerge.