Socializing Emotional Discomfort: a Micro-interactionist Study of Collective Creativity

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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.