LEADING IN THE UNKNOWN: MODELLING AND EXPERIMENTING DEFIXATING LEADERS OVERCOMING HETEROGENEOUS FIXATIONS
Résumé
As teams become increasingly cross-functional, defixating leaders, who guide their teams toward creativity by overcoming the fixation bias, must now manage the heterogeneity of fixations in their teams. In this study, we conducted an experimental protocol that aims to find out whether leaders who do not share the same fixations as ideators will still manage to defixate them through minimal directive feedback, and whether leaders are able to adapt to the ideator's fixations. Our results show that leaders with heterogeneous fixations with respect to the members of their teams will have more facility guiding their teams to achieve better creative outcomes. Moreover, we showed that leaders do not seem to be able to adapt to the ideators' fixation to give their feedbacks. On the one hand, we show that leaders tend to reject highly creative ideas and on the other hand, that they are not able to recognize the ideas that are in fixation with the ideator. Thus, to foster the creativity of teams by giving feedback, it would be better to have leaders who do not have the same fixations as their teams.