Designing AI for team ideation: How content strategy and participation style affect creative performance through team emergent states
Published in International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 2025
Abstract: Generative AI is increasingly used in team ideation, but how its design features affect creative performance is unclear. Research on human teams suggests that such effects are mediated by team emergent states (TESs, the team’s cognitive and emotional dynamics and feelings). Yet, whether TESs play a similar role in team-AI co-ideation remains unknown. This study explored the effects of AI content strategies (breadth-first vs. depth-first) and participation styles (active vs. passive) on TESs and performance during team-AI collaborative ideation by a mixed-design experiment with 52 students and in-depth interviews with seven professionals from industry. In the experiment, two participants and AI as a team brainstormed and developed design solutions. We found depth-first strategies fostered stronger convergence among ideas and members and further enhanced solution completeness, whereas breadth-first AI increased divergent performance and solution practicability. AI design influenced both cognitive and affective TESs, which predicted objective and subjective performance differentially. This study reveals how the design of generative AI affects human-AI collaborative ideation through the perspective of TES and suggests designing generative AI to adjust to TESs and the creative process.
Highights:
- AI content strategies and participation styles support creativity differently.
- Depth-first strategies promote convergence and increase solution completeness.
- Breadth-first strategies boost divergent performance and solution practicability.
- AI participation styles amplify the effects of content strategies.
- We identified key team emergent states for team-AI collaborative creative process.
Recommended citation: Xi Xiao, Yue Chen, Can Liu, "Designing AI for team ideation: How content strategy and participation style affect creative performance through team emergent states." International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, 2025.
Download Paper