The Collaborative Middleground: How Employees and Managers Co-create Novel Ideas

Abstract – Creative employees in incumbent firms face various barriers when pursuing creative work, including managers’ limited cognitive attention and focus on short-term goals when assessing premature ideas. These conditions may discourage employees from disclosing novel ideas in fear of negative evaluation or lack of support. Exploring how these organizational actors – creative employees and managers – deal with these barriers to generate novelty is a potential path toward developing a fine-grained understanding of collective creativity. This study proposes the concept of the collaborative middleground within an organization to depict the dynamics of collaboration among cross-hierarchical actors to generate novelty and combine their resources whereby resource flows are governed through collective action. This study shows how these actors jointly construct the middleground and engage in play-like activities that foster collaborative creative work and set their interaction apart from normal work. Their joint interactions bridge the common cognitive, affective, and material disconnection and distance between organizational actors embedded in different hierarchical layers, and facilitate collective creativity and the flow of resources. Furthermore, this study sketches out the main mechanisms that shape the quality of collaboration of six co-creation projects that arose from the middleground activities through the joint experience of both positive and negative events.