Managing Creative Innovation Team Composition: Diversity of Personalities and Innovative Outputs

The importance of teams in the successful functioning of modern organization is widely recognized. So as innovativeness of the company is known as a main source for competitiveness in the global market nowadays. Since innovation process is closely linked with creativeness much attention was paid on creativity and innovation management in all the levels: individually, in a team, company, or even society. A dominant way of thinking about teams with respect to their capacity for creativity and innovation usually seems to be input-process-output models, in which variety of inputs combine to affect intra-group processes and, in turn, influence team outputs. In fact, most studies have been focusing on the input parameters as a context that surrounds a team or diversity of skills, competences, gender, professions when analyzing inputs from the individual perspective. Thus the personality composition of teams have been studied in order to understand combinations of team members' individual characteristics, as reflected in team-level, which would enhance creativity and innovation. What is missing is an analysis of how diversity of personalities in team composition contribute to innovation at the project level. Thus the aim of this paper is to provide a conceptual model on composition and performance management of creative innovation teams. Constructed conceptual model that derives from literature review is empirically tested conducting a research on creative innovation students' teams and their performance. The new methodological approach to study diversity is applied that comprises not only the mix of personalities, but either evaluates team roles taken by the members. Such analytic approach enables to investigate the importance of diversity in personalities and disclose possible performance patterns of creative innovation teams resulting different innovative outputs.