I’m not doing academic research much anymore, but here’s an overview from my days as a professor.
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My research interests include Creativity, Decision-Making, Power and Status, User-Centered Design, New Product Development, Teams, Organizational Culture, Service Innovation, and Cognitive Style (e.g., need for closure, tolerance of ambiguity, conceptual integration, and information search behavior).
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My advisor is Barry Staw. My orals committee included Phil Tetlock , Cameron Anderson , Sara Beckman , and Robert MacCoun.
Overview of Research Program
My research explores the tension between freedom and constraint in two distinct but related areas: creativity and social cognition. In my work on creativity, I seek to understand how creativity and innovation are influenced by constraint and choice. For instance, I have found that moderate constraint—not total freedom—is optimal for creativity. In my work on social cognition, I explore how perceptions of the social environment affect cognition and performance. For example, I found that accurately perceiving group values predicts status and team innovation.
Social and cognitive psychology provide the theoretical foundation of my research, but as an organizational scholar I aim to solve cross-disciplinary problems by using diverse methods in a variety of settings. My research designs include experiments, field studies, multi-level surveys, interviews, and archival content analysis. Outcome data include expert judgments, round-robin peer-ratings, and performance metrics.
Creativity: How Constraints Influence Creative Decisions
My first stream of research focuses on the strategic, evaluative aspects of creativity, innovation, and design. It asks, “How do people decide how to generate new ideas? How does corporate strategy influence the evaluation and sharing of innovative ideas? When is there a downside to choice?”
My dissertation examines how constraint—any restriction on freedom, such as rules, norms, boundaries and scarcity—shapes creativity. While freedom has long been considered essential to creativity, recent research shows that having too much choice can
be aversive and detrimental to decision-making – a phenomenon known as the “paradox of choice.” Creative people anecdotally describe a similar experience known as the“blank page effect,” wherein approaching unstructured problems is difficult and
demotivating. My research resolves this apparent contradiction. Using a novel experiment design, I found that constraint affects creativity curvilinearly; as predicted, individuals were most creative under moderate constraint, not low (Joyce, forthcoming).
My fieldwork suggests that in teams, social processes intensify this inverted-U shaped pattern.
My ongoing research looks at the moderating effects of power, and aims to identify the processes underlying the effects of constraint. Possible mediators include risk perception, information search behavior, and affective reactions associated with extensive choice, such as overwhelm and regret. Research suggests that experienced or highly creative people tend to be skilled in selecting their own constraints. Thus, I am also examining how individuals and teams impose constraints upon their own creative work and how the effects of self-imposed constraints compare to the effects of externally imposed ones. Future research will identify individual differences which moderate the effects of constraints like need for closure and expertise, and situational factors like public versus private idea generation and selection.
Social Cognition: How Perceptions of the Social Environment Shape Thought
My second stream of research explores how people perceive their social environments, which includes power structures, accountability relationships, customer needs, shared expectations, and values and norms. My work measures these perceptions
and their effects on creativity, cognitive style, and decision-making, asking, “How do perceptions of the social environment affect cognition and performance?” What are the effects of cognitive diversity on the evolution of group values? How does power
influence the perceived riskiness of novel ideas? How do teams form shared understandings about what problems to solve?”
This work crosses levels of analysis, examining individuals (Chatman, Wong & Joyce, 2006; Joyce & Jennings et al., under review; Tetlock & Joyce, forthcoming), teams (Hey, Joyce & Beckman, 2007), and organizations (Lyons, Chatman & Joyce, 2007). I found that groups that engaged in structured social interaction (round-robin idea generation) generated more ideas, used more specialized knowledge, and had more members decide to collaborate than did groups that spent the same amount of time in unstructured interaction (group brainstorming) (Joyce & Jennings, et al., 2007, Joyce & Jennings, et al., under review). In our study of an investment bank, my collaborators and I identified the bases of a “service innovation culture” (Lyons, Chatman & Joyce, 2007).
While creativity is known to be associated with risk, and power has been shown to decrease people’s perceptions of risk, researchers have not yet examined the effects of power on creativity. My current experiments explore how one’s position of power in an organization affects their risk perceptions and willingness to share original ideas.
New Product Development Team Data
Lastly I will describe a unique multi-level dataset that my collaborators and I handcollected. Over a period of two years we tracked 62 new product development teams at the Haas School of Business and M.I.T as they went through the entire team innovation process, from problem to idea to working prototype. All teams had similar crossfunctional compositions and followed nearly identical project timelines, making them unusually comparable. The data are both quantitative (two self-report surveys, two round-robin surveys, and expert performance ratings) and qualitative (interviews, observations, sketches and deliverables, and emails). Some of these documents are currently being content-coded for quantitative analysis. The rare combination of statistical power and rich detail makes this dataset a valuable asset for my future research.
During early data collection my collaborators and I became intrigued by problem framing, a critical process by which teams develop shared understandings of the problems they are trying to solve. Our first study found that teams sharing raw data (from product users) were most effective in framing, while sharing only interpretations exacerbated latent misunderstandings, and resulted in factions and time crunches shortly before the final deadline (Hey, Joyce & Beckman, 2007).
Theory suggests that individuals who understand the values of people around them are better positioned to gain power and status, but little research has examined whether this is true. Using multi-level modeling, Cameron Anderson and I found that the more
accurately individuals perceive their group’s values at project launch, the greater status they have at project completion (Joyce & Anderson, in progress). Jennifer Chatman and I found that teams’ final products were more original when members accurately perceived group values during early concept generation, but that this effect disappeared over time (Joyce & Chatman, 2006). My future research will use this database to test the effects of teams’ self-imposed constraint (found by coding early mission statements) on group conflict and the originality and quality of final products.