Complex, knowledge-intensive projects often present challenges in terms of defining the work and determining roles. In such situations, external leadership can provide the necessary direction and shape. By doing so, the external mentor facilitator clarifies the ambiguous nature of the work, giving it a clear focus that guides the team's efforts. Research has acknowledged the increasing trend of interdisciplinary teams being assembled to tackle pressing issues (Hung, 2013), and has explored the processes of collective creativity and interaction flow (Van Oortmerssen, Van Woerkum, & Aarts, 2014), as well as team dynamics and social interactions (Walter and Bruch 2008; Lehmann-Willenbrock et al. 2017).

With hackathons and rapid product prototyping more feasible than it ever has been, collaborations that fast-track innovation by drawing together unfamiliar experts are more common than ever. Drawing on the process perspective on creative action (Cronin & Lowenstein, 2018; Harvey, 2014; Perry-Smith & Mannucci, 2017) we seek to understand the generation of new ideas and solutions when teams are working within an extremely brief time frame of one week. The influence of mentor facilitators on these interactions has, however, received limited attention.

In this study, we aimed to elucidate various mentor facilitator behaviors through a typology of recognized leader behaviors and to evaluate the corresponding outcomes. The mentor facilitators in this study were all assigned to teams for the duration of the project, and their power, both formal and informal, was ambiguous. Given the prevalence of this type of team and the teams' need for guidance, we studied fifteen case teams who participated in the boot camp, five per year in the years 2017, 2018, and 2019. Each year, the newly formed interdisciplinary teams of seven members were created and tasked with coming up with a collective NIH-style health-focused proposal that incorporated their expertise. Over the course of four business days, the teams drafted proposals and prepared presentations that were given to a panel of experts at the end of the week (on the fifth day). Our team analyzed recordings of interactions during these four days. Teams were also assigned scores by independent evaluators for their presentations and accompanying written materials.

To reduce mission ambiguity, some external facilitators overlaid their problem definitions and frameworks from their prior work experience to define and shape the team’s aims. Some of the external mentors provided problem scaffolding at the onset, while a subset of mentor facilitators continued to provide such a high structure to the team’s developmental process over the remainder of the week. On the other hand, other project mentors abstained from providing structure to address the problem ambiguity, letting the individual members shape their common understanding of the problem collectively over time. Thus, these projects differed in the extent to which some structure was placed around the mission and planning process. This difference turned out to be very important as some guidances from external mentors was helpful, but helpfulness was less positively related to team outcomes when it persisted later in the team process.