A Longitudinal Analysis of Team Creativity Evolution Patterns Based on Heterogeneity and Network Structure: An Approach with Agent-Based Modeling

Abstract

Creativity management has attracted wide attention because it is considered a strategic source for improving an organization's innovation and performance. This research investigates the effect of influencing factors on team-level creativity, including heterogeneity, degree centrality, and structural holes among various contextual and social factors that affect team creativity. Furthermore, this research focuses on the longitudinal evolution patterns of team creativity in order to address how the effects of heterogeneity and the network structure change over time. While previous studies on team creativity generally utilize a cross-sectional approach, we adopted an agent-based modeling (ABM) approach in order to longitudinally analyze the change and evolution patterns of team creativity. Through experiments using an agent-based creativity simulator (ABCS) based on NetLogo language, we found that team creativity evolution patterns show inverted-U patterns on the time dimension. Furthermore, we found that the network structure, such as degree centrality and structural holes, is a more effective factor in improving team creativity than heterogeneity over the long term, although both heterogeneity and network structure positively affect team creativity.