Hyrbid Brainwriting: The Efficacy Of Alternating Between Individual And Group Brainstorming And The Effect Of Individual Difference Variables

Abstract

AbstractThree studies were designed to test the efficacy of hybrid brainwriting procedures as compared to the traditional individual and group brainstorming. The hybrid brainwriting procedures were designed by alternating between individual and group ideation. The first study examined the effect of two hybrid procedures on quantity as compared to the individual brainstorming procedure. Starting the hybrid process with an individual brainstorming phase (AGAG) produced slightly more ideas than doing so with a group phase (GAGA). This hybrid condition (AGAG) was also significantly better than the alone condition. A second study was designed to compare the hybrid conditions to a group condition along with the alone condition, and practice sessionswere added to the beginning of each session for all the conditions. This time the results showed that the AGAG condition led to significantly more ideas than the group condition but not the alone condition. The third study tested the hybrid, alone, and group conditions after makingsome methodological changes and yielded results consistent with Study 2. The effect of several individual difference variables on idea generation was also tested. The results showed that openness to experience significantly predicted the number of categories explored. Set-shifting ability also had an indirect effect on novelty via the number of categories explored.