A Review of How Team Creativity is Affected by the Design of Communication Tools

Team creativity can be strongly affected by communication. With the trend of online collaboration, the design of communication tools increasingly affects different creative processes of teams working online. To clarify this effect, this study took the perspective of affordances and reviewed 54 papers to map the needs of teams, the design of communication tools, and the effects of tools on creativity in different creative stages. First, we summarized teams' requirements for communication tools in different stages. Second, we identified key affordances with relevant features. Third, we discussed how these affordances could affect communication and team creativity in different stages and built a mapping of creative teams' needs and communication tools. The mapping can provide insights for both designing communication tools for creative teams and expanding the current team creativity theories to fit the online context and new communication technologies.