Training Team Creativity with Lego Serious Play: Upside and Downside of Team Diversity

This study examines whether Lego Serious Play (LSP), a facilitated workshop method that combines visual modeling, storytelling, and hands-on building, can enhance collaborative creativity in teams, and how team diversity shapes that outcome. The authors argue that diversity has a double-edged effect: it can stimulate divergent thinking and new perspectives, yet it may also generate interpersonal tension that erodes commitment, voice, and ultimately creative team performance. The work is framed around a proposed three-path mediation model linking diversity to commitment, commitment and voice to performance, and voice as a supportive team climate.

The empirical core consists of a study of 40 teams comprising 172 individuals, drawn from Dutch universities and including both students and teachers, conducted between 2018 and 2022. Mindset diversity was measured with the Insights Discovery IDPE instrument, and outcomes were captured through pre- and post-training questionnaires. The central finding is a significant negative relationship between team diversity and commitment (β = -.23, p < .01), while commitment and voice each positively predict creative performance, supporting the proposed mediation structure. The authors conclude that diversity's benefits for new ideas can be undermined by reduced commitment unless teams are carefully managed.

The study also identifies conditions under which LSP appears most effective: teams of roughly four members, a wicked (complex, ill-defined) challenge, professional facilitation, and sufficient time for the process. These findings position structured facilitation as a means of converting diversity's creative potential into performance gains. The scope is limited to Dutch academic settings and a student-dominated, short-term sample, and performance was assessed through self-reported measures, which the authors acknowledge as constraints on generalizability. The work draws on a substantial body of research spanning team diversity, creativity, knowledge sharing, leadership, and LSP methodology.