Choreographing Creativity: Exploring Creative Centralization in Project Groups

Abstract

Research at the intersection of creativity and leadership has predominantly focused on how leaders support employees’ creativity. We break new ground by examining how creative project leaders generate ideas and influence products throughout group project work. Through an inductive study of modern dance groups attempting to develop and perform new choreography, we discovered that high creative team environments did not produce the most creative products; instead, the most creative products were associated with more leader-driven contexts. We show how contexts varied in the level of creative centralization, which we define as the extent to which creative contributions and decisions converge on a focal person. Combinations of six different creative work processes—concept-focused launch, action-focused launch, leader experimentation, co-creation, additive synthesis, and evaluative synthesis—enabled the emergence of variations in creative centralization and its associated outcomes. Our findings reveal new research puzzles at the intersection of creativity, leadership, and group work, as well as how leaders manage compositional creativity over time.