An empirical study on firm R&D team's creativity: implications from China's hi‐tech industries

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the influence approach between team leadership and research and develop (R&D) team creativity in one joint‐venture firm of Chinese hi‐tech industries.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 14 R&D teams in one leading electronic joint‐venture firm in China based on questionnaires. Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis to test the mediate effect of knowledge sharing on the relationship between leader's empowerment behavior and team creativity.FindingsThe results reveal that, after the effects of leader's empowerment behavior had been controlled, tacit knowledge sharing contributed significantly to the explained variance of team creativity, while the explicate knowledge sharing was not significantly affect the creativity. Thus, tacit knowledge sharing partially mediated the relationship between leader's empowerment behavior and team creativity. The limitations of this study include it just selects the self‐report questionnaire to do the data collection, and the samples just come from one company in China.Practical implicationsThis empirical study implicates that it is necessary for R&D team leader to manage team communication, such as management the team communication channel and work place, as team communication is the pre‐requirement of the team divergent thinking. Second, team leaders can use the empowerment behaviors to encourage team members do tacit knowledge sharing. This might be a challenge of Chinese R&D team leaders in the hi‐tech industries. It means instead of maintaining personal authority which is the traditional leadership behavior in China, R&D team leader should learn to do more empowering behavior to improve the team creativity.Originality/valueThis paper points out team communication is the important approach between team leader's empowering behavior and the team creativity under the merging contexts. Furthermore, it empirical finds that the tacit knowledge share rather than the explicit knowledge sharing has such mediation effect.