Initiative climate, psychological safety and knowledge sharing as predictors of team creativity: A multilevel study of research and development project teams

Abstract

This paper examines from a multilevel perspective the contributions of initiative climate, psychological safety and knowledge sharing to team creativity in research and development (R&D) project teams. We propose and test an organizational learning contingency model of creativity, reflecting on how initiative climate interacts with employees' psychological safety in influencing knowledge sharing and teams' creative performance, by collecting data from 352 employees comprising 88 R&D teams in Taiwan at two time points and from two sources, team members and team leaders. Results indicated that knowledge sharing acts as a mediator in the relationship between initiative climate and team creativity. Results also supported the cross‐level moderation effect of initiative climate on the relationship between psychological safety and knowledge sharing behaviour. We also made the interesting but unhypothesized findings that tenure differentiation and education diversity both negatively influenced team creativity and go on to discuss both theoretical and practical implications of our research.