Tacking Amid Tensions: Using Oscillation to Enable Creativity in Diverse Teams

Abstract

Diverse teams may potentiate greater creativity through divergent thinking. Yet research suggests these teams face a dilemma: the very features that make them promising are associated with persistent communication challenges that threaten their effectiveness. We turn to the literature on dialectical tensions to argue that a process of oscillation, consisting of repeated alternation between moments of divergence, emphasizing the differentiation of perspectives, and moments of convergence, emphasizing integrating ideas to produce coordination, may mobilize the tension between differentiation and integration effectively. We explore the utility of our framework by applying it to the experiences of a diverse cohort of researchers who engaged in a purposefully designed oscillatory process to generate research projects related to climate resilience. Our multimethod evaluation of this case indicates that oscillation was effective for creative idea generation. This work contributes to both practice and scholarship in interdisciplinary teamwork support, creativity, and organizations.

Keywords

collaboration teams diversity creativity divergence convergence group processes

Sailing ships cannot move directly into the wind, but they often need to go in that direction. How does one sail against the wind? A crew does this by tacking—that is, turning the craft so that the direction of the wind changes from one side of the sail to the other. Tacking is about balance. Stay too long on one course, and you will miss your target; stay too long on the other, and you will lose headlong momentum. The result is a weaving course that makes steady progress against a prevailing wind. This oscillation helps the crew advance toward their objective.

Tacking requires tight coordination among crewmembers and crews are, of course, teams. In this article, we argue that navigating the challenges of diverse teamwork requires strategies not unlike a sailboat’s tacking. Such a strategy enables a diverse team to move against social forces that would otherwise steadily push against team creativity: the very characteristics of diverse teams that make them promising for creativity also make them fraught with obstacles. Diverse teams can assemble a wider array of knowledge than any single individual (March & Simon, 1958). Yet diversity also produces persistent communication challenges. Differing backgrounds introduce differences in perspective, values, and motivations that can hinder members’ ability to work together (Keyton et al., 2008) and these teams may experience disproportionately heightened conflict and coordination costs (Cummings & Kiesler, 2007). Unfortunately, current research can suggest “relatively little about how organizations should [emphasis added] be managing diversity effectively” with confidence (Guillaume et al., 2014, p. 798).

This article seeks to build theory on how diverse teams can facilitate creativity by actively managing the tension between differentiation and integration. We identify a theoretical mechanism similar to tacking as a potential tactic to address this tension. We begin by first exploring tensions in diverse teams. We then use this grounding to argue that repeated alternation—what we call oscillation—should help teams take advantage of the benefits of each end of the differentiation–integration tension while affording flexibility to pivot when the teams start to experience the negative impacts of one side. We explore these claims by analyzing the experiences of a diverse cohort of researchers focused on addressing resilience to climate change whose engagement was strategically designed with a grounding in oscillation. Our analysis provides initial evidence that the procedure created alternating periods of integration and differentiation as theorized, and that this oscillation positively contributed to team outcomes. To close, we discuss how these findings help generate theory about the experiences of alternation, and how these contributions can motivate the design of a potentially replicable procedure.

Using Oscillation to Foster Creativity in Diverse Teams

Creativity has historically proved a challenging concept to operationalize (Amabile, 1996). Most conceptualizations describe creativity as a quality of an object or product. An advantage of this conceptualization is that it allows researchers to evaluate, measure, and analyze well-defined, discrete products through variance methods. However, others have also conceived of creativity as a process. When viewed as a process, creativity is inherently embedded in its context and temporal in nature (Poole, 2013). One benefit of this view is that it emphasizes the role that communicative and organizational factors play in the production of creativity. To study creativity requires understanding the complex, dynamic processes that underlie idea generation, as it is “difficult to study the activities or steps in which change and innovation unfold using variance methods” (Poole, 2013, p. 379). We conceptualize creativity as the process by which a team produces solutions, products, or processes that are new, impactful, and useful (Amabile, 1996; van Knippenberg & Hoever, 2017). Creativity may occur through a sudden insight or invention, but more often happens when individuals and teams explore and combine previously unconnected ideas (Hargadon, 2003). When effective, this process produces outputs that are novel compared with the existing state of the art (Amabile et al., 2005).

Diversity can be a key enabler of the creative process. Diversity, operationalized here as the presence of multiple differing perspectives toward a research problem, has long been regarded as a potential well-spring for creativity and innovation. Indeed, van Knippenberg and Hoever (2017) write that diversity may be the “sole, most important reason why teams may be better suited to perform creative tasks than individuals in isolation” (p. 43). It is important to mark that our operationalization centers the role of informational diversity (the presence of differing knowledge among team members) over other important aspects of difference that influence team dynamics (e.g., trait or value diversity; van Knippenberg & Mell, 2016). While all aspects of diversity are important, we center informational diversity here because past research has tied this type of difference most closely with the potential for team creativity (Jehn et al., 1999; van Dijk et al., 2012). Diverse teams corral a multitude of experiences and skills that afford a wider pool of knowledge to foster the creative process than that which is available to individuals or uniform teams (Brandon & Hollingshead, 2004). As a result, diverse teams are positioned to diagnose and understand complex problems, such as the creation of knowledge products like patents (Chunlei et al., 2014) or addressing pressing challenges in science (Uzzi et al., 2013).

Diversity also engenders communication challenges. Differing languages, values, and motivations can hinder collaboration (Carlile, 2004; Keyton et al., 2008), and diversity can be a source of conflict (Jehn et al., 1999; Larkey, 1996). When not managed effectively, conflict can lead to destructive behaviors such as arguments, withdrawal, and avoidance (Weingart et al., 2015), reduced trust (van Dijk et al., 2017), and decreased team cohesion (Guillaume et al., 2014). Engaging in diverse teams can also involve higher potential for failure largely because of these communication challenges (Cummings et al., 2013; Leahey et al., 2017).

These mixed findings suggest that how a team addresses diversity can affect its creativity. As we see, simply increasing diversity is not adequate alone to increase creativity while maintaining effectiveness. Diversity scholarship has explored multiple mechanisms to address this issue. One approach is to emphasize the importance of integration processes on diverse teams, which should reduce some negative impacts of high member heterogeneity. Guillaume et al. (2012) developed propositions that frame integration as a way to build members’ sense of belonging on diverse teams. The authors argue that members of diverse teams are less likely to identify with members of their team and thus less motivated to contribute, decreasing the team’s overall effectiveness. One suggestion, then, is that managing team diversity requires a focus on social integration to create a unified team identity that motivates diverse members to come together to achieve a common goal. Although Guillaume et al. (2012) provides an example of how integration can help teams manage diversity for effective outcomes, practitioners are still left without clear guidance on how to simultaneously harness the benefits of having differences. Integrative solutions minimize, rather than capitalize on, diversity. Thus, it is crucial to consider strategies that allow teams to integrate and find common ground while also helping teams draw on diverse perspectives that catalyze the creative process. We believe this managerial challenge—balancing the costs of diversity with its benefits—is due to a fundamental tension: the dual needs of integration and differentiation.

The Differentiation–Integration Tension in Diversity

Communication research has long acknowledged tensions as an inherent characteristic of organizations (Erhardt & Gibbs, 2014; Poole, 2013; Poole & Van de Ven, 1989; Putnam, 1986; Putnam et al., 2016). Collaborative work engenders multiple tensions that members must address if they are to succeed (Poole, 2013). We argue that the promises and challenges of creativity in diverse teams are enacted through an ongoing tension between the opposing states of differentiation and integration. A sensitivity to dialectical tensions leads us to recognize that this opposition is not something that can necessarily be eliminated or reduced; rather, we must accept this tension within diversity as a persistent pressure and ask how to manage it (Ferdman, 2017). In the section below, we conceptualize this tension as an avenue to design procedures to employ it in creative processes.

Teams face an enduring challenge of meeting the need for specialization on one hand and coordination on the other (March, 1991; Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967). Differentiation takes advantage of differences within a diverse team, including differences in background, experience, discipline, and values (Folger et al., 2018). This state potentiates creativity because it allows the group to capitalize on its diversity of perspectives in a domain (March, 1991). But if differentiation becomes too pronounced and unchecked, it can fragment the team and produce conflict. Differentiation can be a well-spring of ideas but may also foster conflict by foregrounding differences.

Integration compensates for these negative tendencies by generating cohesion and allowing ideas to come together toward common ground, keeping the team together, and allowing for work coordination (Grant, 1996; Nonaka, 1996). But integration can homogenize the team and dilute the benefits of differentiation based on diversity. Integration not only enables coordination but also increases the likelihood of biases due to conformity pressures and, in some cases, may reduce the range of ideas available to the team. These contradictory needs are a defining characteristic of creative diverse teamwork. As a result, differentiation creates greater need for integration, but swinging back to the integration state simultaneously creates a greater need for differentiation. If the team emphasizes only one state, it will lose the benefits of the other; in essence, each pole is antagonistic (Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967). As Cropley (2006) writes, “[b]oth too little and too much is bad for creativity” (p. 391). Both sides are necessary, but also limiting. This tension is particularly salient with diverse teams: Their primary advantage (a plurality of perspectives and expertise) is also their primary challenge (a need for coherence and coordination), making diversity eternally Janus-faced. Diversity thus provides a conundrum, which requires not just understanding, but managing, its core tension. Fortunately, this dialectic can be addressed by the dual procedures of divergence and convergence.

Leveraging the Differentiation–Integration Tension Through Oscillation

One avenue for addressing this tension evolves from our recognition of the processual nature of creativity. Innovative ideas develop iteratively, and this process is not uniform over time: moving between the two states of differentiation and integration requires strategies that intentionally focus on harnessing the benefits of each state. Organizations that are simultaneously able to highlight both differentiation and integration to a high degree may be the most successful (Puranam et al., 2009; Terjesen et al., 2012). How can teams utilize this tension for creativity?

Cropley (2006) describes divergence and convergence as contrasting creative phases. Divergence is a period of work that emphasizes multiplicity and difference through which groups rapidly develop ideas. In this way, divergence directly addresses the need for differentiation. Divergence produces a rich variety of ideas and knowledge for team members to use in their work and provides opportunity for discovery and recombination of ideas in novel ways (Cropley, 2006; Georgiev & Georgiev, 2018). But this constellation of resources can lead to ambiguity about how the team should proceed. In contrast, convergence is a period of work that emphasizes unity and shared focus (Cropley, 2006). Here, the team reduces or combines ideas to achieve joint direction toward common solutions (Brophy, 2001). As a team converges, it moves toward integration, which permits the formation of connections based on potential solutions’ trade-offs, syntheses, and emerging higher order concepts (Suedfeld et al., 1992). As with divergence, strict convergence can be problematic: this phase has the potential to arouse uncertainty, as team members may question whether they will be validated and included or invalidated and excluded. This, as well, can lead to conflict as teams struggle to situate themselves for future progress. Thus, both processes are necessary to leveraging diversity and creativity in teams, and neither is sufficient alone.

The divergence–convergence model has traditionally been viewed as a two-stage process—first divergence, then convergence (Cropley, 2006). But, a two-stage process does not fit the dynamic, processual nature of idea generation and creativity. Team creativity is iterative and recursive; ideas are generated, combined, and amended as part of an ongoing process. A nonlinear understanding of creativity reflects research stating that novel insights do not just occur all at once but may emerge from iterative drafts and from dwelling with a problem over an extended period (Goh et al., 2013; van der Vegt & Bunderson, 2005). Current studies on divergence and convergence recognize the necessity and utility of both in creativity processes. “Recent accounts of creativity . . . highlight the interwoven role of both convergent and divergent thinking . . . both convergent and divergent skills [are needed] in equal proportion” (Georgiev & Georgiev, 2018, p. 2). Divergence and convergence are stronger when combined and should be seen as “complementary processes” (Brophy, 2001, p. 452).

Our conceptual framework to address this tension relies on two primary ideas. First, that creativity is a dynamic and interactive process that occurs over time, and second that divergence and convergence work best when building off the other. The emergent idea, then, is to create a specific process that allows both convergence and divergence to occur repeatedly in the same space and over time. Drawing on this idea, we propose an oscillating pattern of divergence and convergence. Given the shortcomings of a phased approach, the challenge should be to manage the core differentiation–integration tension over time. Fortunately, the literature on organizational tensions offers a potential solution.

One way to address this tension is through a strategy of alternation. Alternation embraces dialectical contradictions through processes that emphasize each pole (Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Poole & Van de Ven, 1989). Therefore, instead of a single two-stage process, a strategy of repeated alternation would suggest diverse teams should be subject to continuous oscillation, much like a sailboat continually tacking against the wind. By oscillating, teams should prevent momentum toward either side of the differentiation–integration tension, which should accommodate the complex, longitudinal nature of creativity. A dynamic of oscillation can destabilize the divisive impact of diversity during convergence. Temporal and life cycle variables, such as group member tenure, team longevity, and time, might positively moderate workplace diversity effects because it likely takes time to overcome stereotype-based impressions and uncover unique information, knowledge, and perspectives associated with workplace diversity (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007).

Oscillating between divergence and convergence periods enables diversity to reexpress itself in ways that make future convergence periods more productive and less likely to lead to impasse. This would generate a tightening spiral that can lead to increasing integration and unification of the team around a creative concept. The two states can capitalize on their tensions and build on the benefits of both integration and differentiation while mitigating negative effects of either. Through repeated alternation teams can repeatedly “tack” between divergent and convergent activities over time without remaining for too long at any one side. Figure 1 provides a conceptual illustration of this proposition.

Figure 1.

Tacking in a sailboat (left) and the oscillatory procedural framework (right), whereby teams undergo periods of divergence (which emphasize differentiation) and convergence (which emphasize integration)

Accordingly, we designed a procedure to promote oscillation as a mechanism to foster a creativity-inducing environment. Therefore, we ask as follows:

Research Question 1: How do the participants describe their experiences as they move through the oscillating process?

Addressing this question enables us to ascertain what the procedure “does” to the participants, and whether they view the oscillation as fostering positive experiences that promote group productivity. This leads to a second question which builds on the first:

Research Question 2: Does the proposed strategy facilitate team creativity and the production of creative products?

Method

We engaged in an applied intervention as a method to initially assess our approach and develop our understandings of how individuals on real-world teams experience oscillatory processes. Driven by our framework, we designed an intervention with the goals of: (a) supporting the ongoing interaction of groups of diverse individuals over time; (b) incorporating recurring oscillations between periods of convergence and divergence, as opposed to a single cycle; (c) enabling members to progressively build on one another’s ideas so that a common set of projects emerges; and (d) promoting assessment of ideas based on the multiple perspectives of group members, thus ensuring that it takes advantage of diversity.

To permit longitudinal engagement required by our framework, we designed our procedure to engage a cohort of researchers in a series of activities occurring over a period of 6 months. The core structured activities involved a series of three workshops (2-3 days each) over this period, each designed to lead the cohort through repeated cycles of divergence and convergence. The content of the workshops guided the cohort through defining projects, forming teams (Workshop 1), and working toward a project through ongoing iteration and feedback (Workshops 2 and 3). Drawing on the notion of alternation as one way to manage diversity’s central tension, each workshop was structured to facilitate oscillations between states of differentiation and integration that would repeat over the entire course of the process.

We drew on divergent procedures, such as brainstorming techniques, to encourage differentiation in a way that emphasized the cohort’s differing knowledge. We drew on convergent procedures, such as facilitated discussion and thematic analyses, to encourage teams to consolidate their wide perspectives into an integrated state. Appendix B (available in the online Supplemental Material) provides a detailed workshop agenda for the first workshop and a conceptual justification underlying our choice of activities and how we sought to produce longitudinal oscillation. The result was a longitudinal procedure that shifted between divergent and convergent phases. The guiding intention was that teams would experience repeating periods of work that alternately highlighted and satisfied the contrasting needs of integration and differentiation, multiple times each day and at times multiple times within an hour. For the sake of parsimony, Appendix B (available in the online Supplemental Material) only describes the procedure of our first workshop to illustrate this principle in action. Detailed agendas for the second and third workshops are available from the corresponding author on request.

Beyond the periods of oscillation designed into the workshop agendas, we structured the intervening periods between the workshops to facilitate further iterations of the oscillation. The groups worked apart during a three-month gestation period where the research teams developed their ideas into proposal drafts. The groups reconvened at a second workshop for a day and a half to further develop their projects, which focused on clarification of projects and engaged discussion on maximizing each project’s potential. Following this workshop, the groups continued to develop their projects with guidance from organizers and expert grants writers. Figure 2 provides a summative illustration of the procedural process and the long-term oscillation occurring across the course of several months.

Figure 2.

The longitudinal oscillations between periods of divergence and convergence through the entire length of the procedure.

Application to Scientific Teams Addressing Climate Change

We chose the scientific problem of resilience to climate change as an initial context to apply our framework for several reasons. First, climate change is one of the most pressing issues requiring scientific and creative problem solving (Committee on Key Challenge Areas for Convergence and Health, 2014). Second, reports have characterized climate change as a “wicked problem” requiring coordinated attention from diverse communities (Committee on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research & Committee on Science Engineering and Public Policy, 2005). Last, the term “climate resilience” was sufficiently ambiguous that we could harness its polysemy to recruit a diverse population of participants.

We recruited 17 participants from a pool of applicants based on their research records and potential for producing impactful research. Participants represented 13 academic institutions (six Historically Black Colleges and Universities, three Hispanic Serving Institutions, three Tribal Colleges and Universities, and one Land Grant University) and nine distinct disciplinary identities (Atmospheric Science, Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, Geography, History, Indigenous Studies, Physics, and Urban Planning). Participants represented a variety of career stages: five assistant professors, one associate professor, one associate researcher, two industry professionals, two full professors, two PhD students, one adjunct professor, two instructors, and one teaching assistant professor. Twelve participants were male and five were female. We did not collect explicit data about participant ethnicity to avoid potential perceptions of tokenization during the process of selection and procedure (Turner et al., 2010). Additionally, because we sampled, in part, from small, region-specific institutions in specific fields, reporting more detailed demographics of participants may have posed a real risk of exposing the identities of some participants. We reasoned that sampling researchers from such a range of institutional and disciplinary backgrounds would provide sufficient informational diversity to address the project goals.

Assessment Methods

We collected a broad range of data to assess whether our procedure produced the intended oscillation process, and how participants experienced the procedure in action. Drawing from tenets of grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 2014; Gioia et al., 2012), we approached our data collection and analyses with a sensitivity to the fact that the researchers were situated in the production of the findings and measurements. We collected data from four primary sources: (a) workshop questionnaires, (b) semistructured interviews with participants, (c) external assessments of project proposals, and (d) other associated procedure outcomes (such as measures of team characteristics, secured funding, number of ideas generated, finished proposals, etc.). We drew on these multiple data sources to allow us to triangulate our results (Eisenhardt, 1989), as triangulating better allows researchers to bolster the validity and reliability of results (Tracy, 2013).

We administered surveys at regular intervals between workshop sessions to allow us to capture participant responses to the process in situ. In these questionnaires, participants were encouraged to reflect about that moment in the workshop. Questionnaires included two items where participants indicated their current energy and satisfaction and one open-ended item where participants recorded their thoughts at that moment. Because participants responded to these questionnaires in interstitial periods between activities, the resulting data captured feedback in real-time. In the subsequent analysis, this would permit us to tie responses to specific moments in the process. Next, at the conclusion of the final day of each of the workshops (Workshops 1, 2, and 3), participants responded to a postworkshop questionnaire that captured summative assessments of the process and invited reflection on each of the major sessions. As opposed to the real-time questionnaires, the postworkshop questionnaire permitted participants to reflect holistically on each session in the context of the larger process, as well as to provide perceptions of important team outcomes like cohesiveness and efficacy.

The next source of data came from NSF-style project summaries each team produced at the conclusion of the procedure. These summaries were evaluated to provide an initial indicator of whether external audiences perceived the teams’ products as creative. The results from this analysis would serve as part of the assessment of the relative effectiveness of the process, as the ultimate goal of the process for participants was for their teams to develop and submit novel project proposals. We analyzed these documents using Amabile’s (1996) creativity evaluation technique, which involved recruiting a group of subject matter experts to evaluate the projects on three dimensions of creativity (see Appendix A, available in the online Supplemental Material, for full measure). A detailed description of this procedure follows in the findings section.

Finally, we conducted semistructured interviews to solicit participants’ elaborations about their experiences working within an environment grounded in oscillation. The research team conducted these interviews by phone and each interview took between 30 and 60 minutes. In total, 13 interviews were conducted; four members of the cohort were unable to be interviewed. Given the researchers’ embedded position in the design and evaluation process, we took two steps to encourage candid responses from our participants. First, the members of the research team who performed the interviews were not actively involved in designing and facilitating the procedure. Second, we made participants aware their interview data was embargoed from the workshop facilitating team members until after the procedure was complete. This had the added advantage that interviews would not create biases that potentially reduce negative responses by participants.

The first author began analysis by open coding interview recordings and open-ended survey responses. To ground ourselves in the data, we purposefully approached this round of coding without a sensitivity to any specific theory. The first author assigned descriptive codes which summarized the primary topics discussed by the participants in each segment of the interviews. The analyst did not attempt to collapse codes to allow emergent categories that would follow the manifest topics. This round of coding revealed recurrent accounts of participant experiences and perceptions of process, which began to suggest that process and oscillation were a good fit for these data.

In the next phase of analysis, the first author conducted a round of selective coding. In this stage, coding was sensitized by an interest in the broad questions of process and early notions of the oscillation framework we had been developing. The selective coding process led to isolating any instances where a participant discussed their teamwork processes or experiences during and between the workshops. Next, through an emic process, each of these instances was marked in accordance with two broad patterns. An instance counted as involving teamwork processes any time a participant described how their team or a team member had worked (during, after, or between the workshops) or how they perceived the team was functioning (including evaluative statements). An instance counted as an experience of the workshop any time a participant described an evaluation of the process (negative, positive, or ambivalent), their feelings or thoughts during the process, or feedback on the process or procedures (including recommendations and critiques). An “instance” in the data began at the first point in the conversation when any of these examples was observed and ended when the topic of conversation changed.

The previous round of coding resulted in coded sections of data that specifically involved the process and experiences of the process. The first author proceeded with a second round of selective coding, using an interest in how participants experienced and perceived the process as a sensitizing lens. For example, codes were applied for the valence of the comment (i.e., positive, negative, or ambivalent), for the distinction between discussion about the procedures versus teamwork (although these categories were not mutually exclusive), and contextual information, among others. These codes were developed emically and applied iteratively; codes were not determined a priori. Rather than allowing theoretical frames to drive the analysis, codes were directly drawn from participant experiences in the data and elaborated on throughout data analysis.

Now that there was a general understanding of the kinds of statements made and the contexts in which they were made, we were prepared to begin searching for linkages between these instances of experiences and perception. This began the second stage of analysis, which included the other researchers. As a group, the researchers participated in a round of axial coding, whereby we aggregated themes into categories (Corbin & Strauss, 2014). Resulting from this round of axial coding, several categories emerged. Specifically, categories included accounts of how the process affected work and outcomes, experiences during the workshop in relation to the switches between different types of tasks, and a growing/changing perception of the nature of work on such a team. As a final round of analysis, the first author revisited the data to make sure no further categories emerged. When none did, the analysis concluded. Each of the categories related directly to elucidating the experience of oscillation on team and outcomes, and constitute the findings discussed below. Importantly, a cross-cutting theme across these was recurring findings that participants did experience and perceive periods of oscillation during the process.

Findings

Participant Perceptions of the Procedure

We expected that the procedure would produce periods of integration and differentiation and, ultimately, have positive effects on the creativity process in the diverse teams. The following section explores these expectations by considering participants’ reflections on their experiences. Analysis found three broad themes in the data: (a) perceptions of the procedure’s role in outcomes and processes, (b) perceived uncertainty, and (c) perceptions that work required “balancing” of tensions.

Attributions of Success as Resulting From the Procedure

Participants credited the procedure itself as a key driver of the outcomes they experienced, identifying three components of the design as playing important roles in their creative process. First, participants acknowledged the presence of diversity as a key basis for their success. Second, participants credited the processes of the procedure with harnessing the advantages of existing diversity. Last, participants connected the diversity and procedures with positive outcomes both in teamwork and their creative products (e.g., ideas, teams, projects).

Participants associated the presence of the right inputs (i.e., the diversity of ideas and people) with the process itself when they described the outcomes they witnessed. One participant remarked on the ways her diverse team coalesced and collaborated:

I think we have a lot of respect for our ideas even though we come from different backgrounds, and it just seems to really mesh well. I’ve definitely worked in groups when someone has an idea and someone has a very different idea . . . [On this team] when someone has a really good idea, we’re all like, “yeah, let me see what I can add to that.”

Her observations illustrate the productive dynamics in the team. Diversity, a potential source of conflict, is turned into an asset through congenial collaboration among teammates. We also note the fluid needs of executing oscillation present in statements like these (e.g., from divergence “someone has an idea and someone has a very different idea” to convergence “when someone has a really good idea . . . ‘let me see what I can add to that’”). Diversity and differentiation (of ideas, people) requires careful alternation and at key moments. Creative processes must pivot during crucial periods (“when [emphasis added] someone has a really good idea”) for them to be effectively utilized.

Accordingly, the sequencing of activities themselves was roundly credited as playing a role in how participants explained their own short- and long-term outcomes. For example, one participant recounted how the activities built on one another during a workshop, and how he perceived the process as leveraging ideas out of diversity:

[We] go into a room, we start talking about who we are, where we’re from, what our favorite song is. These sorts of things . . . building up to . . . in the same room, in the same group of people, hashing out ideas, putting it on butcher paper just to get it up, saying “what do you think of this?” Deliberating on the ideas, reconvening, and coming back to offer critique and comment. . . . All leading up to something concrete that we could walk away from with an understood division of labor and a target.

The participant viewed the procedure as enabling his team to produce something concrete from a room full of people with different questions, interests, and perspectives. We believe he implicitly described oscillation as a key component of this process in his discussion of the role of “deliberating on ideas” (divergence), “reconvening” (convergence), and “critique” (divergence). Moreover, he highlighted the value of concluding with a period of convergence and commitment to produce something “concrete.”

These comments suggest participants connected these outcomes—diversity and the final projects—with the experience of oscillation. These comments also evince that it was not just the presence of the right ingredients (diversity) but that creative processes’ sequencing and timing were crucial to these inputs being effectively utilized. Furthermore, participants went beyond recognizing the jumble of activities as constructive, but consistently recounted the changes in different styles of work at certain moments as positive contributors.

Perceived Uncertainty

Further evidence of oscillation emerged in recurring descriptions of uncertainty during moments of transition between divergent and convergent activities. Uncertainty took the form of questions of how or when ideas and teams could come together. Participants paired uncertainty with feelings of ambiguity and discomfort as they wondered how these people, ideas, or projects would fit with one another. One moment when this was visible emerged as organizers led participants through a nominal group technique (NGT; Delbecq et al., 1975) procedure during Day 1 of the first workshop. The NGT begins with structured brainstorming, whereby participants silently list potential ideas regarding a prompt, and then serially list these ideas on a joint display. This divergent procedure was designed to elicit the participants’ differentiated perspectives before they moved to later steps of integration in the NGT in which they collapsed, combined, or discussed ideas. At its core, the NGT purposefully cultivates an episode of alternation from differentiation into integration, and thus provided a rich opportunity to solicit participant experiences of this process.

At this juncture in particular, participants both registered positive reactions to and relayed discomfort at the open direction of the activity. Expressing reservations about the process as they reflected on the sheer number of ideas before them, one participant stated in a comment, “I appreciate the open direction and enjoy it. However, I would prefer to have some more direction . . . ” We believe these “but” statements (“I appreciate . . . [h]owever . . . ”) reflect the differentiation–integration tension. Per our framework, differentiation should be followed by integration; a “jumble” of ideas can only serve as a resource from which to derive more focused, coherent projects. These statements highlight participant perceptions of a potential for convergence (“I appreciate”) while acknowledging the need for constructive criticism (“however”).

After the NGT session, participants not only experienced uncertainty, but voiced a desire for further convergence. For example, one participant noted, “Many of these projects have similar overlaps . . . it would be good to consolidate ideas so we are not all working in parallel . . . or maybe this is good?” Participants wanted to begin consolidating and refining what they saw as a broad array of disparate ideas. Indeed, before the start of the next activity where participants would begin to integrate individuals’ ideas, a participant commented positively on how people were beginning to collect around different themes. But, in a later interview, he recalled his thoughts at the time: “how is this going to all work out?” That participants felt the need for integration in the face of multiple ideas underscores the consequences of the differentiation–integration tension.

These excerpts track what we expected to be the participants’ reactions: Divergence should foster uncertainty because groups will have difficulty seeing connections among ideas (Cropley, 2006; Georgiev & Georgiev, 2018). This uncertainty should create a need for the team to decide which ideas—or combination of ideas—to converge on and move forward with. One participant described the initial series of divergent procedures as “in some ways putting the cart before the horse,” expressing his sense that a project should start with a shared goal and then generate divergent ideas on how to achieve it. The framework required at times radical periods of divergence in order to maximize the advantages of diversity, but this led, necessarily, to unclear and multitudinous paths moving forward. Together, these data suggest that not only did the design produce this discomfort, but participants noticed and experienced it. Taken with the context under which these comments were made, participants may have been sensing that a style of work (divergent or convergent) was beginning to lose its positive effects. Indeed, participants most often expressed uncertainty in those moments that our framework might suggest that continued overdivergence or overconvergence would rapidly begin to be unproductive. To manage participant reactions to the differentiation–integration tension, the procedure must promote a fine, and well-timed, balance between the two, as we see in the third theme.

A Balancing Act

As teams shifted into the divergent work period following the first workshop, participants expressed a growing perception of their projects as a balancing act. Teams felt they needed the flexibility to value differing expertise and the focus to consolidate diverse knowledge into an actionable set of creative ideas. One participant identified achieving balance as an inherent challenge:

You have asked us to find a team, coming from different disciplines—knowledge from different disciplines that can lead the team. Each person has their own expertise and finding the common ground among the different teams is hard right now.

To be successful, teams felt they must balance a plurality of differences while also finding productive common ground.

Another participant noted that success in these conditions required flexibility to balance the team’s contrasting needs. Progress on his team had slowed to a frustrating level, and in his interview, he noted one area in which he felt his team could have done better. He said,

The balance [on teamwork] is allowing as much flexibility as you can at the local level. What are the areas we can agree on, what are those we have strong preferences on? If we all have different things that are all interesting at a local level, let’s all explore those and come together and share on our localized research. We don’t all have to be investigating the exact same thing because different things are all important to us in different places. And maybe there’s something to be learned from that.

That he notes this tension (“the balance”) as well as the ways in which his team must manage it (e.g., having “flexibility” in exploring things individually before reconvening and integrating) suggests this participant saw the procedure as highlighting the dual pulls of differentiation and integration. To participants, the procedure is suggesting a method to both value and manage the pulls of integration and differentiation

In sum, these data suggest that participants experienced oscillation in a few notable ways during the procedure. Participants associated the oscillatory process with the successes they saw, experienced moments of uncertainty resulting from oscillation, and came to view their own work as a balance between competing needs. But how did this procedure whose design was guided by our framework affect team outcomes like creativity? We explore this question in the following section.

Procedural Impacts on Creative Products

That participants credited the procedure as facilitating their generation of teams and projects serves as initial evidence that a procedure designed under the auspices of oscillation can be effective. Our second research question centers on an exploratory assessment of how oscillation positively affected team outcomes. We now turn to products of our procedure to address this question more fully. If the procedure facilitated creative ideas, the teams’ products (i.e., documents like project summaries) should be more creative than comparable products made outside of the procedure. Our assessment serves as an initial indication of potential outcomes of an oscillating process as presented above, rather than a standalone measurement of team success.

We used a creativity assessment technique (CAT) developed by Amabile (1996) to evaluate the creativity of the projects generated by the teams compared with projects related to climate resilience currently funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). CAT involves presenting the products to be judged to a group of domain-familiar experts. In our study, the products were NSF-style two-page summaries of research projects: two generated in our workshops and five randomly selected from comparable, already funded NSF projects on climate resilience. The judges evaluated each product along three dimensions: novelty, feasibility, and impact. Amabile (1996) included novelty and feasibility as dimensions of her creativity construct. We added impact as a third dimension based on the NSF’s criteria for creative work addressing grand challenges (NSF, 2014).

We employed a two-step selection process in which the members of the research team first rated the project summaries for the five teams on the creativity scales. We selected the two highest rated summaries to submit to the expert judges. Preselection of a subset of our proposals helped reduce fatigue on the judges (see Einhorn et al., 1977) and provided a fairer comparison with high-quality, funded projects. Given that the NSF has historically had a proposal success rate between 20% and 30%, we reasoned using our two highest performing proposals would sufficiently mirror this rate while still allowing us to assess multiple projects.

To provide comparison with existing climate resilience research, we sampled five project descriptions that received funding from NSF from a sampling frame of 3,000 summaries retrieved from NSF Fastlane. Our initial sample consisted of grants currently under award that included the keywords “climate resili*,” “mitigat*,” “adapt*,” “sustain*” in their title or project summary. We reduced the sample to include only projects addressing social consequences through changes or developments in infrastructure, science, engineering, or technology. For renewals, we kept the most recent iteration of the proposal and excluded grants with more than $1 million in funding. Last, we removed all doctoral dissertations. Our rationale for these choices was to make our ground comparison cases as similar as possible to the projects generated by our groups. This reduced the sample to 330 projects, from which we took a random sample of five summaries to serve as a comparison for analysis. Next, we asked six subject matter experts (four assistant or associate professors, a doctoral candidate, and a climate specialist from a tribal college) to rate each of the seven project descriptions on nine items that measure the three dimensions of creativity. Data were collected through an online survey that anonymized the projects and gave no indication which were generated by our project teams and which were funded NSF projects.

Interrater agreement for ratings on the projects was assessed using the intraclass correlation (ICC) measure for exact agreement among raters (ICC2). A significant test for this measure indicates that agreement among raters is adequate, and the value of the coefficient gives an indication of the degree of agreement. For all scales, the ICC2 was significant, with values ranging from .95 to .39 (see Table 1). Raters had high levels of agreement on five projects, but there was some level of disagreement for two of the projects. Because creativity is domain-specific, Amabile’s (1996) CAT argues for the use of interrater agreement as the primary criterion of validity. We aggregated the creativity scores across the three dimensions, to give an overall index of creativity. The two project summaries created by teams using our procedure had mean total creativity scores of 49.33 and 56.17, respectively, out of a possible score of 63. These scores were on par with those of funded NSF projects, which ranged from 46.67 to 59.4; projects generated using our procedure ranked 2nd and 6th respectively of the seven projects rated. These results indicate that the projects generated from the procedure were at least as creative as currently funded NSF research.

Table 1.

Reliability of Project Ratings.

Ratings	Cronbach’s alpha	ICC average measure
1. Prep Engs	.948	.951*
2. Emp Comm	.856	.845*
3. Sim Plat	.858	.875*
4. En Loc Comm	.826	.812*
5. Drought Pred	.959	.943*
6. Change Narr	.379	.392*
7. Delto Co	.408	.401*

Note. ICC = Intraclass correlation.

p < .05.

These findings suggest the oscillatory procedure facilitated the teams’ production of creative products. Further indicators support that the teams’ work was productive. Team dynamics are also a useful indicator of team success. In regards to team-level effectiveness, participants rated their teams highly in measures of team efficacy (rated 1-5, with 1 indicating low efficacy and 5 indicating high efficacy; M = 4.43, SD = .47, n = 15) and group cohesion (rated 1-5, with 1 indicating low cohesion and 5 indicating high cohesion; M = 4.43, SD = .45, n = 15) in postworkshop questionnaires. Additional evidence of effectiveness comes from the results of the workshops. The procedure was clearly productive in terms of ideas. At the conclusion of the first workshop, participants had generated 125 unique research problems addressing climate change resilience. The first workshop resulted in nine potential research projects, from which the teams selected five for further development. Two of these eventuated in full proposals and one team’s project was selected for funding through a competitive review by the Environmental Protection Agency. Our assessment yielded initial indication of positive outcomes for our participant teams. We now turn to refocus on the theoretical process identified in this article.

Discussion and Conclusions

The article has described a fundamental tension between integration and differentiation in creative, diverse teamwork. We explored a strategy to foster creativity by oscillating between divergent and convergent activities, thereby accessing states of differentiation and integration. By alternating between these states over time, teams oscillate between each pole in order to facilitate creativity. Findings from our case study supported that the proposed strategy generated differentiation and integration through alternating between convergence and divergence. In exploring Research Question 1, we found three main themes emergent in our interview and free response survey data: participant accounts that (a) divergence/convergence oscillations were key drivers in team processes and successes, which (b) required managing forces resultant from diversity while utilizing its necessary advantages, and (c) incited feelings of discomfort and uncertainty, particularly during moments of transition.

Regarding Research Question 2, creativity ratings and outcomes of project development provided evidence that the oscillatory strategy facilitated the generation of creative teams and projects. Findings from the creativity assessment indicated that the projects generated from the strategy were as creative as funded NSF projects in the same domain. In addition, the conclusion of the first workshop saw the development of diverse teams that scored highly on measures of team efficacy and cohesion. Finally, at least one project was approved for funding by a major research funding agency.

There are several strengths to the design of this study. First, the teams were observed closely over time, which allowed us to track the procedure and the effects of the procedure on the team processes in detail. Second, researchers collected subjective and objective data through interviews, open-responses, and observations. Although we are not able to make claims of causality, the breadth of data gave us a strong foundation of participant experience and perception of oscillation. Similarly, the products of the procedure were assessed by domain experts, which lent external validity to the findings on creativity. Third, we employed and tested the theoretical framework in practice with bona fide science teams. As a result, we could assess the procedure in an applied context where teams and individuals faced, and overcame, external barriers that mirror experiences from the real-world practice of team science.

Theoretical and Practical Implications

A key element of our procedural framework is that it supported the entire creative process—from team formation to proposal development—rather than just offering support for one or two phases of the process, which responds to recent calls for more dynamic, temporal perspectives on how diverse teams work (Guillaume et al., 2014; van Dijk et al., 2017). Our results suggest that participants were satisfied with the results of the first workshop in which they identified promising projects and formed into research teams with common interests. Rather than focusing on a single event, we were able to look at creativity as an iterative process over time and we showed value in this approach. As our interview and real-time data indicated, our participants attributed the ongoing engagement of the procedure as a key contributor to their ultimate productivity.

Regarding a more dynamic perspective, our findings suggested that—just like simply increasing diversity is insufficient for greater creativity (van Knippenberg & Hoever, 2017)—simply taking teams through a prescribed series of convergent and divergent activities is not the sole ingredient to team success. Participant accounts evinced that it was often the careful sequence and reflexive timing of procedures that they perceived as most useful. Our analysis suggests that perceptions of uncertainty might be indicators of the team’s need to “tack”—either from divergence to convergence or vice versa. Uncertainty (and its resolution) might be an important generative experience in the alternation approach we have provided, despite uncertainty’s deleterious potential in team innovation (De Clercq, 2019). It is not enough to just tack—rather, teams must tack at the right moments. These findings suggest that any managerial guidance through these procedures must be sensitive to and reflexive about ongoing team processes.

We provide evidence that builds on why fluid, context-specific procedures designed on the auspices of oscillation have promise when applied to creative work on diverse teams. We have developed a framework that is internally referent to process and interrogated not only what shifts to make but when to make them. Indeed, as we found, a theme that cut across our qualitative findings was that sequence, timing, and sensitivity to process matters. We have argued that oscillation is important and have begun to identify signals for when “tacking” is necessary. Thus, a key conclusion is that procedures for intervening should strive to be reactive and reflective rather than prescriptive (and doubly so given that diversity presents and manifests itself in a multitude of context-specific ways; Poole, 2013).

Next, by tracking and guiding the teams through the entire month-long creativity process, we were able to both observe the processes at play and increase claims of external validity. This study finds evidence that taking a processual and longitudinal approach to team science is both valid and necessary if we are to design interventions that faithfully support the reality of teamwork. Each team in this project experienced conflicts and tensions during the gestation period, and many participants credited the longitudinal support of the procedure and of their cohort as one of the key facilitators to their continued engagement.

We also found evidence for the differentiation–integration tension. The findings suggested that not only did oscillation occur through alternating procedures of divergence and convergence, but that the measured and repeated switching between differentiating and integrating tasks was effective in fostering creativity. We proposed that differentiation and integration were communication processes that exist fundamentally in tension with each other. Each effort that produces benefits also produces challenges that counterpose the other. This work supports the notion that, like most tensions, differentiation–integration should not be treated as reconcilable but instead as something to be continually managed. This suggests the way we think about interventions and group processes should shift to a more open, dialectical process wherein diversity is not an issue to be solved through integration but instead be in conversation with it. This claim aligns with similar calls that organizational actors adopt “a paradox lens” in innovation and creativity (Liu et al., 2020, p. 361).

It is worth noting that although our study has focused on the tension between differentiation and integration, we are not claiming that this is the only tension that diverse teams face as they collaborate. As Poole (2013) has argued, diverse collaborations are characterized by multiple complex tensions by their very nature. For example, teams face the need to balance individual-level goals and collective goals, to balance structured action while allowing for emergent findings, and to balance a value for individual expertise while seeking to understand partners’ knowledge. Given our initial evidence that a strategy of oscillation was effective at addressing one tension, our study provides support for the claim that interventions designed to address tensions through a tactic of alternation might be particularly effective in these contexts as well. Clearly, further research will be required to assess whether this is the case. Future work should also consider testing oscillatory procedures on the logic of a field experimental design.

Despite the uniformly positive feedback and promising performance outcomes, the procedure is not a panacea for the challenges of diversity on teams. Although our cohort generated five project teams from a cohort of 17 strangers, only two of those teams successfully produced proposals for a funding agency. Those other three teams eventually disbanded due to a varied set of factors ranging from individual differences, institutional pressures, and the challenges of working on geographically distributed teams. Clearly, further research is needed to examine the uniquely compounding nature of the social barriers inhibiting group processes on diverse teams.

Furthermore, the current analysis focused specifically on how the adoption of an oscillation strategy influenced teams’ experiences managing the challenges of informational diversity. Informational diversity is but one of many forms of difference that can influence team dynamics (van Knippenberg & Mell, 2016). Given that our participants represented a variety of institutions serving historically underserved populations, our data also include rich accounts of the challenges faced when seeking to collaborate across organizations with different institutional positions such as group identity (Crary, 2017), functional diversity (Zhang, 2016), or institutional diversity (Clark, 2010). In another analysis, currently underway, we are exploring our participants’ experiences of barriers that emerged as a result of other forms of diversity, and the tactics they deployed to manage those barriers.

Finally, this work has direct implications for agencies and organizations that are interested in developing and funding creative research teams and projects. One clear applied implication of this work is the implication that organizations might consider investing resources in enabling and expecting process work that clearly incentivizes (and maximize the potential of) diverse teamwork through oscillation. For example, most agencies require researchers to include a project description that outlines the intellectual merit, research design, and procedures for accomplishing proposed outcomes in their grant proposals. Organizations interested in facilitating creative success on diverse teams might consider requiring proposers to specifically outline in this section the techniques they will use to foster the ongoing exchange and production of knowledge on interdisciplinary teams. If making this an explicit requirement were deemed too onerous, it still might be useful to include an assessment of proposed team processes as an important component of the selection process for interdisciplinary research projects.

Practitioners can consider applying structured interventions that facilitate longitudinal engagement and support, especially on diverse teams. Policymakers have increasingly recognized that diverse teams are necessary to address many grand-challenge problems in science such as climate change, food and water security, and energy sustainability (Committee on Key Challenge Areas for Convergence and Health, 2014). This assertion is supported by findings from the science of team science, which suggests that, when successful, diverse teams can be a well-spring of innovation across the boundaries of scientific fields. Our project demonstrates that simply getting a diverse cohort of individuals in the room is a necessary, but likely insufficient requirement to sparking successful diversity in science. Indeed, other research shows that most attempts at building diverse teams in science fail (Leahey et al., 2017). This project suggests that mitigating these challenges will require organizations to develop longitudinal support structures that actively cultivate oscillatory processes on nascent scientific teams.

This study has several limitations. Longitudinal study of teams is time and resource intensive, which limited the number of participants we were able to support and study over 6 months. We were limited by a small number of teams with which to assess our process, and therefore by a small number of project proposals to use as outcome measures. Furthermore, this project focuses on the outcomes of a single instance of procedural intervention. What this work lacks in numbers, however, is made up for in an in-depth case study that applies a theoretical model to real, interdisciplinary science teams. Although the findings are encouraging, replication with multiple cohorts will be important to validate and extend conclusions about the procedure. Furthermore, as our workshops focused on the creation of grant proposals for real science teams, our research team had to take care to not become overly involved with the “fates” of our subject teams. To mitigate this risk, the research team took intentional steps to externally validate and analyze the data collected (including external judges for creativity assessments and embargoing data from research members involved in organizing). In these ways we limited our biases, but it remains possible our interest in the teams’ success had some impact.

To conclude, we provide an overall structure of oscillation, shifting between divergence and convergence, as one exemplar for both researchers and practitioners to build from (see Appendices A and B, available in the online Supplemental Material). Although the particulars of our procedure can easily (and should) be altered to fit the needs of individual contexts, we believe that our overarching structure of oscillation over time, between integration and differentiation, knits together a promising theoretical understanding of diversity and creativity.

Supplemental Material

Appendix_A_and_B – Supplemental material for Tacking Amid Tensions: Using Oscillation to Enable Creativity in Diverse Teams

Supplemental material, Appendix_A_and_B for Tacking Amid Tensions: Using Oscillation to Enable Creativity in Diverse Teams by Sam R. Wilson, William C. Barley, Luisa Ruge-Jones and Marshall Scott Poole in The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants NSF EFMA 16-29367 and NSF EFMA 17-45889

ORCID iD

Sam R. Wilson

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

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