Abstract
Although the academic community has consistent with the key role of entrepreneurial team knowledge diversity (ETKD), which serves as a critical catalyst of creativity in organizations, the extant research on the link between knowledge diversity and creativity is mainly concerned with individual creativity in single-level analyses. With emerging entrepreneurial ventures increasingly relying on innovation enhancement in the form of teams, there is research motivation to explore how team-level creativity develops. In this sense, this study attempts to investigate the underlying mechanism through which ETKD is associated with team-level creativity. Through a multilevel mediation model, this study proposes that ETKD can facilitate team creativity (TC) sequentially transmitted through individual-level team members' knowledge sharing (KS) and creativity. Based on a survey of 252 team members from 42 entrepreneurial teams in China, multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) is applied to test the top–down relationship between ETKD and KS, as well as the bottom-up link between individual creativity and TC. The findings show that our hypotheses are supported. Our findings provide some of the first empirical evidence to examine how knowledge-based diversity of entrepreneurial teams facilitates TC potential by multilevel approach. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also offered.
Highlights
In recent years, an increasing number of entrepreneurial firms have typically been operated not solely by entrepreneurs but rather by entrepreneurial teams
To further advance the literature concerning team creativity (TC), this study aims to open this black box by exploring and testing a sequential intermediating mechanism determined by both knowledge sharing (KS) and team member creativity (TMC) at the individual level, through which team-level entrepreneurial team knowledge diversity (ETKD) contributes to team-level creativity
The average variance extracted (AVE) was beyond the recommended value of 0.5, which revealed that the amount of variance due to constructs’ items was more than the amount of variance due to measuring error (Fornell and Larcker, 1981)
Summary
An increasing number of entrepreneurial firms have typically been operated not solely by entrepreneurs but rather by entrepreneurial teams. Many studies show that startups in the form of entrepreneurial teams are on average more successful than those in the form of solo entrepreneurs (e.g., Roberts, 1991) In this respect, entrepreneurial teams can facilitate the development of new technologies and turn ideas into commercial systems and programs through team members’ interaction and cooperation (Bygrave and Hofer, 1992). Other studies fail to provide evidence for the team–success relationship (Doutriaux, 1992; Der Foo et al, 2005) These mixed results indicate that entrepreneurial firms in the form of team foundations might be one of the key conditions of venture success. The results further suggests that the interaction among team members could facilitate the performance of new entrepreneurial firms in the process of new product or service development
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