Sarah Harvey is a Professor at 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 people work together to synthesise ideas, identify and assess 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, Academy of Management Journal, and Organization Science. She is a Senior Editor at Organization Studies and serves on the editorial boards of the Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, and Academy of Management Discoveries. Sarah has developed and taught courses on creativity, organisational 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. Sarah is interested in the processes through which interdisciplinary and cross-functional teams integrate members’ knowledge to produce ideas and make decisions.

Sarah’s research examines how groups develop ways of understanding creative problems and evaluate creative responses. 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. 

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 on the development of teams and team processes through qualitative research methods.