Membership Change in Advertising Development Teams: The Role of Market Knowledge and Information Elaboration

Abstract

Advertising agencies rely on membership change to improve creative team performance. In a study of 224 advertising projects in the US, I consider the effect of team membership change on two desirable team’s creativity-relevant factors (market knowledge and information elaboration) and how these two factors explain the effect of membership change on advertising creativity. I find that a high degree of membership change in an advertising team reduces team’s market knowledge resource and this can ultimately be detrimental to the process of information elaboration (i.e., reducing the process of information elaboration) and the final creative outcome that is advertising creativity. I discuss the implications for managing teams in advertising agencies where membership change is prevalent.