The Effect of Functional Diversity on Team Creativity: Behavioral and fNIRS Evidence.

This article investigates how functional diversity—variation in team members' job-related expertise—affects team creativity, defined as the generation of ideas that are both unique (novel) and useful (practical). Through an experiment involving 40 two-person teams composed of business and engineering students, the study finds that functional diversity increases the uniqueness but decreases the usefulness of creative proposals, resulting in no overall effect on team creativity. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) hyperscanning technology, the research reveals that functional diversity enhances interbrain synchrony in the right angular gyrus (r-AG), associated with divergent thinking and idea generation, while reducing synchrony in the right superior temporal gyrus (r-STG), linked to convergent thinking and idea evaluation. These findings provide neuroscientific evidence explaining the countervailing cognitive processes underlying the mixed effects of functional diversity on creativity, offering implications for management control decisions regarding team composition in creative tasks.