Creativity in virtual teams: Bridging the gap between professional wisdom and scientific insights

Following the growing body of scientific literature dedicated to the effects of virtual tools and environments on creative processes, we were interested in examining how professional creativity facilitators perceive these technologies and the extent to which they might support their dissemination. To this end, we conducted a workshop with 19 professional facilitators in which they could experience creativity in a virtual environment. Their ratings of the potential impact of such tools on session facilitation, on sociocognitive processes of creativity and on group motivation were collected twice: before and after the virtual session. The results show that their perception of the potential benefits of virtual environments decreased after the test. They mentioned many limitations
of the technology with regard to usual facilitation process. Moreover, their expert perception of the creative process sometimes appeared contradictory to scientific results obtained in the domain. We discuss these results and provide design perspectives to make virtual technologies more acceptable
and usable for creativity facilitators, in order to allow more population to benefit from their positive effects on group creativity.