Leveraging high cognitive trust to promote team creativity Melody Pabon MSLOC 421 Deep Dive – Part 5: Final Article March 13, 2021 Leveraging high cognitive trust to promote team creativity Overview When a team is composed of members in charge of complex tasks that hold divergent knowledge and skills in different areas, and perhaps come from different functional departments in an organization, their success as a group is contingent on their ability to integrate relevant knowledge that is distributed among its members. This article will explore the opportunity to leverage high cognitive trust within a team to promote team creativity; specifically, it will look at how team members’ willingness to rely on another team member’s expertise and reliability – or cognitive trust - facilitates knowledge sharing (Barczak et al., 2010). The article begins by highlighting the importance of this relationship to LOC practitioners, explores the implications of cognitive trust on information sharing – thus fostering team creativity – and ends with recommended best practices to foster information sharing and cognitive trust. Importance to LOC Practitioners There is a need to examine how leaders can set teams up to innovate as a competitive marketplace demands organizations solve increasingly complex problems quickly. This innovation process consists of two main activities: creativity and innovation. Executive team members and team leaders should understand that team creativity doesn’t spontaneously combust from team members that are clear on the collective goal. Creativity emerges synergistically when team members interact in specific ways, where cooperation and collaboration among team members is present; sharing information, knowledge, and novel ideas is the norm in order to successfully cross fertilize ideas for effective solutions (Jain et al., 2015). A better understanding of the relationship between cognitive trust and knowledge sharing will enable practitioners to help team create a solid foundation for creativity and innovation to serve their organization and solve increasingly complex problems quickly. 2 Leveraging high cognitive trust to promote team creativity Opportunity Analysis Team creativity is defined as “teams producing novel ideas and solutions to maintain the firm’s competitive edge” as well as “the production of novel and useful ideas concerning products, services, processes, and procedures by a team of employees working together” (Barczak et al., 2010; Wu, 2016). The predominant theme in literature establishes that high cognitive trust positively promotes team creativity with findings supporting the claim that teams aspiring to increase creativity must focus on developing cognitive trust (Chowdhury, 2005). Various explorations of these variables demonstrate team members’ positive perception of their colleagues’ are reliability and competence – essentially, cognitive trust - is vital to enhancing team creativity (Barczak et al., 2010). Team members are more willing to ask for help to encourage sharing of knowledge to improve their ability to deal with difficult problems when they perceive the advantages of the expertise from the other team members (Wu, 2016). A definite opportunity team leads have is to acknowledge knowledge sharing as playing a facilitating role between cognitive trust and team creativity (Wu, 2016). Knowledge sharing as a result of high cognitive trust is plays a critical function in fostering team creativity. The creative performance of a team is critically dependent on both mobilizing tacit knowledge and fostering interaction with explicit knowledge because the more individuals participate in knowledge sharing, the more likely they are to contribute new information and advance ways to problem solve; (Wu, 2016). 3 Leveraging high cognitive trust to promote team creativity Solutions There are various opportunities to establish the conditions necessary for cognitive trust in order for knowledge sharing to occur. To build and sustain any type of trust, managers need to create situations for formal and informal communication among team members. (Barczak et al., 2010). Team leads can kick-off pre- and post- mortem meetings with an opportunity for team members to self-identify strengths and weaknesses, as well as key takeaways from successful and struggling team dynamics. Having requirements for team member recruitment include skills like working with others, proven track record of reliability and being flexible would set a foundation for cognition-based trust. Additionally, the creation of a team charter where the previous experience, formal professional accolades, and prestigious awards of each member are visible combined with consensus-building norms that require each team member to clarify intentions and delineate the factors of independent decision-making process accelerate the formation of cognition-based trust. Reliability in performing complex roles and educational qualifications, special training, and relevant successful experience would foster high level of cognition-based trust which allows an evaluating team member to trust them and actively engage in collaborative work and seek knowledge from them (Chowdhury, 2005). When team members trust each other to be competent and reliable, they are even more willing to exhibit collaborative behaviors like complex-knowledge sharing, learning from one another, and accepting different viewpoints, leading to an even more creative solution (Barczak et al., 2010; Chowdhury, 2005). Academic sources argue that team members who exhibit professional behaviors by managing their own emotions and those of their colleagues, such as being deliberate in decision making, are trusted and relied on for their competence and ability which increases knowledge sharing and cognitive trust (Barczak et al., 2010; Chowdhury, 2005). Conclusion Solving the complex problems of stakeholders, investors, consumers, and communities requires teams to think outside of the box. The performance of creativity within a team is one that has to be baked into the team’s DNA through cognitive trust and the knowledge sharing that results for trusting in the competence and experience of team members. Organizations will be better prepared to compete and succeed if they intentionally plan to foster that. 4 Leveraging high cognitive trust to promote team creativity References Barczak, L. (2010). Antecedents of Team Creativity: An Examination of Team Emotional Intelligence, Team Trust and Collaborative Culture. Creativity and Innovation Management, 19(4), 332–345. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8691.2010.00574.x Chou, H., Lin, Y., Chang, H., & Chuang, W. (2013). Transformational Leadership and Team Performance: The Mediating Roles of Cognitive Trust and Collective Efficacy. SAGE Open, 3(3), 215824401349702–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244013497027 Chowdhury, S. (2005). The role of affect- and cognition-based trust in complex knowledge sharing: JMI. Journal of Managerial Issues, 17(3), 310-326. Retrieved from http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www-proquestcom.turing.library.northwestern.edu/scholarly-journals/role-affect-cognition-based-trustcomplex/docview/194166014/se-2?accountid=12861 Cirella, S. (2014), "Team creativity: A complex adaptive perspective", Management Research Review, Vol. 37 No. 7, pp. 590-614. https://doi.org/10.1108/MRR-12-2012-0261 Jain, R., Jain, C., & Jain, P. (2015). Team creativity at work: A conceptual framework. South Asian Journal of Management, 22(1), 50-72. Retrieved from http://turing.library.northwestern.edu/login?url=https://www-proquestcom.turing.library.northwestern.edu/scholarly-journals/team-creativity-at-workconceptual-framework/docview/1690205094/se-2?accountid=12861 Kaufman, S. (2019). Organizational Trust: Strategies to Foster Cognitive- and Affect-Based Trust among Virtual Teams. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing. Schaubroeck, J., Lam, S., & Peng, A. (2011). Cognition-based and affect-based trust as mediators of leader behavior influences on team performance. American Psychological Association, 96(4), 863-871. Schumann, J., Shih, P. C., Redmiles, D. F., & Horton, G. (2012, October). Supporting initial trust in distributed idea generation and idea evaluation. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (pp. 199-208). Webber, S. (2008). Development of Cognitive and Affective Trust in Teams: A Longitudinal Study. Small Group Research, 39(6), 746–769. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496408323569 Wu, Z. (2016). Effects of Different Trust on Team Creativity: Taking Knowledge Sharing as a Mediator. In Knowledge and Systems Sciences (pp. 44–56). Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2857-1_4 5
