Sarah Harvey

Sarah Harvey is an Associate Professor in the UCL School of Management. Sarah studies the dynamic processes through which groups and teams engage in creative and knowledge work. She is particularly interested in how interdisciplinary groups synthesize knowledge, identify creative ideas and decide which ideas to pursue.

Sarah’s research appears in leading international academic publications including Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Review, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Research in Organizational Behavior, and Small Group Research. She is on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Small Group Research. Sarah has developed and taught courses on creativity, organizational behaviour, leadership, team effectiveness, negotiations, and research methodology at UCL, the London School of Economics, and London Business School.

Sarah holds a PhD from the London Business School and a BComm (Hons) from Queen’s University in Canada. Prior to her PhD, Sarah worked for the Boston Consulting Group.

Research

Sarah’s research interests include creativity, innovation, dynamic processes, decision making, and diversity in small groups and teams. In particular, Sarah is interested in the processes through which interdisciplinary and cross-functional teams integrate members’ knowledge to produce new ideas and make decisions.

Sarah’s research examines how teams develop ways of understanding creative problems and evaluate creative responses to those problems, and the implications for group creativity. That research re-casts idea evaluation in groups as a generative activity that facilitates the integration and elaboration of novel ideas, whereas most research in this area focuses on divergent idea generation and assumes that evaluation disrupts this process. This provides a novel view of the process of group creativity.

A related stream of research investigates the effects of diversity and changes in diversity in cross-functional and interdisciplinary teams. It finds that diversity, although often assumed to improve creativity and decision-making, can also disrupt a groups’ ability to converge around ideas.

Sarah’s research focuses particularly on exploring the development of teams and team processes over time through qualitative research methods that examine the ongoing interactions between group members.

Research Projects

The creative process in groups and teams

Understanding creative processes in groups

Understanding group diversity over time

Exploring dynamic processes in diverse groups and how the effects of diversity change over time