RESEARCH NEWS
Are Functional Differences Valuable for Creative Teamwork?
ACCOUNTING
Summary by Laura Bilbao, Director of Research & Outreach
From Silicon Valley startups to corporate innovation labs, companies are constantly searching for the ideal team to generate breakthrough ideas. As organizations increasingly bring together employees with different training and expertise, leaders face an important question: Should teams be composed of people with similar backgrounds for smoother collaboration, or should they combine different areas of expertise to encourage fresh thinking?
A study published in Management Science explored this question using both traditional experiments and brain imaging technology. Dr. Sue Yang, Ph.D. and a team of researchers developed a theory predicting that having team members from different functional backgrounds has competing effects on creativity. They assigned two-person teams to propose a creative use for an unused university space. Each team’s proposal was evaluated on three criteria: uniqueness, usefulness and overall creativity.
Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a neuroimaging technology that measures brain activity, was also used during team interactions. By monitoring patterns of neural activation, they could see how team members’ brains responded as they collaborated:
- Teams with members from different functional backgrounds consistently produced more original and unconventional ideas. However, their proposals were often less practical or harder to implement.
- In contrast, teams with similar backgrounds generated ideas that were more useful and feasible but generally less innovative.
The neuroimaging data helped explain why: Brain activity patterns suggested that functionally heterogenous teams engaged in more cognitively demanding discussions when they had contrasting viewpoints. That mental effort can fuel originality, but it also creates friction which complicates the refinement of ideas into workable solutions.
The findings suggest that there is no single formula for building creative teams. Organizations seeking radical innovation may benefit from combining employees with different expertise, while those prioritizing immediate implementation may prefer more similar teams. Most importantly, the study shows that structured communication and deliberate idea-refinement processes can help organizations capture original thinking while maintaining practicality.
Yasheng Chen, Adam Presslee, and Sue Yang (2024). The Effect of Functional Diversity on Team Creativity: Behavioral and fNIRS Evidence. Forthcoming at Management Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02157
Note: All authors contributed equally and are listed alphabetically by last name.
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Sue (Xue) YangAssistant ProfessorAccounting |
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Sue Yang, MD/PhD/CPA, is an assistant professor of accounting in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University. She received her PhD in accounting from Michigan State University. She also holds a medical degree from Peking University and an MS in genetics from the University of Rochester. Before she came back to academia, Sue worked in a leading medical device company for a decade, and her experience encompasses corporate accounting, financial planning and analysis, cost accounting, financial reporting and tax accounting. She has been an active CPA since 2012. Broadly, her research examines how control mechanisms can be used to enhance team and organizational outcomes such as management control system design, creativity and quality performance. Sue employs both behavioral and archival approaches to investigate contemporary accounting issues that are important to the literature as well as relevant for practice. Motivated by her medical background, Sue has a keen interest in interdisciplinary research to link accounting and medical theories. Specifically, Sue is passionate about exploring accounting questions in the healthcare setting and application of advanced medical technologies in accounting research. Her teaching interests include managerial accounting, cost accounting and healthcare accounting. |
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