Creative performance: a comparison of individuals and virtual teams—an experimental study

Abstract There is an increased relevance of non-routine creative work. The use of virtual teams within organizations comes along with communication and coordination challenges for the case of creative work in particular. We focus on the creative performance of newly formed virtual dyadic teams and investigate performance differences compared to individuals working virtually on a creative task. We conducted an online lab experiment, accounting for a work-from-home environment, comprising two working phases one week apart, extending the common focus on one-shot interactions. We make use of Unusual Uses Tasks (UUT) to assess creativity of dyadic teams and individuals. Given that this task is typically used at the individual level, our study contributes to the field of creative experimental tasks by implementing the UUT in a team setting with direct interaction and a virtual workplace. Our findings show that dyadic teams exhibit significantly higher creative performance than individuals across the two virtual phases hinting for the meaningfulness of the UUT approach on the group level. Additionally, we check for mechanisms exploring the performance differences between individuals and teams working on this creative task with regard to heterogeneity in performance, the role of errors next to productive performance as well as the role of trust and sympathy within teams.