GROUP CREATIVITY INVESTIGATING THE EFFECT OF DIVERSITY ON CREATIVE COLLABORATION

The current study looked at the effects of group diversity on collaborative creativity. Examining the way diversity can affect group collaboration is important because groups often work together throughout many different scenarios in one’s daily life. There is a lack of research on group collaboration and creativity, which leaves many questions unanswered. This study examined the effect of diversity with regard to divergent thinking ability on collaborative creativity. A group consisting of participants with high scores on a divergent thinking task was compared to a group in which half of the participants had high scores and half had low scores. These two groups were assigned the task of creating a skit. The results showed no significant difference in perceived creativity between the skits created by the homogeneous and diverse groups. The relatively small sample of participants who rated the creativity of the skits may be responsible for the failure to find significant differences. Having a larger sample size could have altered the results of the study.