Seminar in presence

Building BL26 – Room 0.19 (ground floor)
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Via R. Lambruschini 4/B, 20156 Milano

Santi Furnari
Bayes Business School, United Kingdom

Abstract:

Research on teams has long shown the key role of micro-interactions, cognitive frames and emotions for collective creativity. By interacting with each other, team members develop cognitive frames -schema of interpretation- to define and simplify problems. However, they also often “get stuck” into a frame, becoming emotionally attached to the initial definition of the problem and unable to change it, with negative consequences for collective creativity. This study explores how micro-interactions among team members shape the team’s frames, emotions and collective creativity. It draws upon a longitudinal qualitative case study of a team tasked with discovering innovative applications for a new technology. Initially stuck in a frame, the team ultimately managed to creatively re-frame the problem. By triangulating data from participant observation, interview data and video recordings of the team’s meetings, the analysis focuses on two critical moments: when the dominant frame of the problem emerged and when the problem was unexpectedly re-framed, enabling the discovery of an innovative solution. Combining video-ethnography and micro-interactionist analysis, the study traces the second-by-second micro-interactions unfolding in the meetings, coding the types of interaction patterns, the ensuing emotional dynamics, and the frames used to define the problem. The findings culminate in a micro-interactional process model of creative re-framing centred on the mechanism of “socialising emotional discomfort” -i.e., sharing the discomfort associated with the inherent uncertainty of creative problem solving. The research contributes to theories of team-level collective creativity by showing how emotions and cognitive frames intertwine through micro-interaction and jointly shape collective creativity.

Santi Furnari is Professor of Strategy at Bayes Business School in London and a Visiting Professor at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University in Chicago. He was a 2023-24 Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and previously served as Associate Dean for Executive Education at Bayes. Prof. Furnari studies how organizations can have social impact on local communities and society, for example by shaping the emergence of new industrial clusters, new work practices, and new social spaces and places. Prof. Furnari is Senior Editor at the journal Organization Studies and his research has been published in leading academic journals, such as the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Journal, Management Science, Organization Science, and Strategic Management Journal. His paper titled “Interstitial Spaces” has received the AMR Best Paper Award for the best paper published in the Academy of Management Review in 2014.

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