As a child, I was notorious for insisting on what I called “the regular.” When it came to food, clothes, books, music, and just about everything else, I wanted the same things I’d had before. Keep your novelty and give me continuity, please and thank you.

There are good reasons for leaders to seek continuity on their teams, too. As Leigh Thompson wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal, stable teams come with real benefits, especially when those teams are engaged in highly technical and skill-based tasks—things like performing surgery or flying a plane.

But there are also limits to what stability can achieve, particularly for creative work. The same group of people is likely to arrive at the same kinds of ideas they’ve had before—so personnel shakeups can shake loose fresh ideas. Newbies “stimulate incumbents to re-evaluate their processes and consider new possibilities,” says Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.

In a 2005 study, Thompson and her coauthor found that teams that had undergone a membership change generated 20 percent more ideas in a brainstorming task than those that had remained stable. This wasn’t because the new arrivals had better ideas, the research showed. Rather, the rejiggering appeared to help everyone see things in a new light.

“To be clear, I’m not saying that team leaders should change up group membership in every situation as some kind of universal best practice,” Thompson cautions. “However, if the goal is largely about blue-sky thinking and creative ideation, a membership change might be worth a shot.”

This all came as good news to me, a very recent addition to the Insight team. Admittedly, my arrival has prompted only modest innovation so far—I introduced some new Slack emojis to my colleagues (cat-on-a-roomba, anyone?)—but hey, it’s only week three.

For more detail on the pros of adding a new colleague to the mix, you can read the full piece in the Wall Street Journal.

Thompson’s study echoes other work on the nature of collaboration and creativity. Consider this study from Kellogg’s Brian Uzzi, a professor of management and organizations. He and his colleagues investigated how creative teams self-assemble to have the optimal number of incumbents and newcomers.

The researchers examined both academic and artistic teams, using publication in peer-reviewed journals to assess the scholars, and Broadway playbills from over 2,200 musical productions to study the interactions of key figures including directors, choreographers, and librettists.

What Uzzi and his co-authors discovered is that success came more readily when a mix of veterans and rookies collaborated.