Abstract

Brainstorming meetings play a central role in organizational creativity and idea generation. Their effectiveness depends on sustained engagement, interactional flow, and shared attention among team members. However, meeting participants are increasingly managing parallel digital conversations while collaborating with their teams, introducing competing attentional demands into brainstorming interactions. This pattern of meeting participation alongside concurrent technology-mediated conversations is known as meeting multicommunicating (meeting MC). This paper develops a conceptual framework to explain how meeting MC reshapes brainstorming dynamics through multilevel mechanisms. Integrating the Input–Mediator–Outcome framework with theorizing on the multilevel effects of IT interruptions, we explore how individual-level emotional and behavioral experiences associated with meeting MC propagate to influence team-level processes and states. We also advance a set of propositions linking these spillover processes to variation in idea quantity and idea quality generated during brainstorming. By doing so, this paper highlights how meeting MC alters creative collaboration and provides a foundation for future empirical research on MC in contemporary team settings in organizations.

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