وظیفه دشواری و تنوع تیم در خلاقیت تیم: رویکرد شبیه سازی چند عاملی

Organizational structures are complex and vary according to sector, field, and type of business or service. In order to be effective, an organization needs to tailor its activities to the environment in which is it located. Based on contingency perspectives, this study is focused on investigating effective ways to design team diversity and maximize team creativity according to task difficulty levels. Considering the organizational team member as an agent, the study employed a multi-agent simulation method to understand the progress of creative manifestation, by observing the exploration and exploitation activity of team members over certain periods of time. The results first reveal that the level of team diversity influences the amount of creativity manifested by team members’ activities, such as exploration and exploitation. Second, managers have to properly facilitate either exploration or exploitation depending on task difficulty by striking a balance between them.

Long-term organizational success depends upon the balance between exploration and exploitation (Chang and Harrington, 2006 and Jansen et al., 2006). From an organizational perspective, it is best to maximize both, but this is difficult to achieve simultaneously with limited resources. Therefore, it is important to strike a balance between the two activities according to the organization’s environment (March, 1991); however, finding the point of equilibrium that can maximize creativity and productivity is challenging. This is because balance can be interpreted very subjectively according to individual organizational circumstances. Above all, the balance needs to be appropriate to the situation. According to the contingency theory, “there is no single organizational structure that is highly effective for all organizations” (Donaldson, 1996, p. 57). Therefore, an optimal structure is dependent upon various contingency factors, such as task uncertainty, strategy, and technology, which reflect the influence of the environment. Specifically, the organization needs to fit its activities to the environment in which the organization is located to be effective (Donaldson, 1996). In this sense, task-solving processes are generally influenced by both the characteristics of the task itself and by the organizations that solve the task. Accordingly, this study focused on examining existing research and determining how to establish proper strategies for situation-appropriate exploration and exploitation activities. The aim is to maximize team performance by taking into consideration task difficulty as a situational factor and team diversity as an organizational characteristic. In particular, the study applied an agent-based simulation method to understand the progress of creative manifestation through exploration and exploitation activities by team members according to the passage of time. The objectives of the study are as follows: to investigate how task difficulty and team diversity affect a team’s task-solving processes in terms of the team members’ exploration and exploitation behavior, and, in turn, team performance; to identify effective ways of designing team diversity according to task difficulty; and to find strategies for striking a balance between exploration and exploitation that can maximize team creativity in any given circumstance

Considering an organizational team member as an agent, this study analyzed the effects that task difficulty and team diversity have on exploration, exploitation, and team creativity by using an MAS approach. In particular, NetLogo was employed to conduct the MAS, entitled EECS here. We investigated the pattern of the average values of exploration, exploitation, and team creativity, based on different levels of task difficulty (high and low) and team diversity (high, middle, and low), over the various periods of time and using the EECS. As a result of the analysis, the following information was discovered. First, the level of team diversity influences the amount of creativity manifested by team members’ activities, such as exploration and exploitation. When the level of team diversity is in the middle range, team creativity value is relatively low compared to teams with high or low diversity. Second, when task difficulty is high, explorative activities play a more crucial role in contributing to the revelation of creativity after a certain amount of time has passed, whereas exploitative activities are comparatively important in the early time periods. Finally, when the team deals with a low difficulty task, exploitative activity is more influential to the manifestation of creativity.