Professional creators are responsible for generating and implementing innovations in organizations. Despite innovation’s criticality for organizational survival and growth, very few studies in the creativity, innovation, or business literatures address this population. This study investigated the little-understood phenomenon of creating with others in a professional setting. The research question was, How do professional screenwriters experience working with a team on their screenplays?
Eight interviews with active screenwriters in the major U.S. motion picture industry were evaluated for insights into professional creators’ unique experiences. The study findings revealed thoughts, feelings, words, and actions of a critical population whose voices are conspicuously absent in the scholarly conversation. The data from this study established a small yet significant baseline understanding of how professional creators’ experiences align with prevailing group creativity and team innovation theories. The findings also provided a rare glimpse into the film business—a multi-billion-dollar industry that provides filmed entertainment to almost every country in the world—whose inner workings are closed to outsiders. Participants illustrated 13 practices for achieving security, sanity, harmony, respect, and success in their creative collaborations with motion picture development team members. A polarity between individualism and collectivism emerged across the findings, capturing the dynamic tension between the self and others in creative collaboration, an unsubstantiated given in many related studies. An intervention designed to help teams manage polarities was suggested to explore how the findings could be addressed in organization development practice. Read the study...