Necessity is the Mother of Innovation: A Quasi-Experimental Study of Stress-Driven Innovation

Abstract

Innovative teams are typically assumed to be successful teams, but little is known about innovation in teams that face stressful conditions. Although necessary to cope with such conditions, innovation or the generation of novel and useful ideas and their implementation to create improvement, may also provoke further stress, leading to negative rather than beneficial outcomes. To study this, we conducted a simulation study of teams simultaneously working on time-critical tasks of physically manufacturing greetings cards in a competitive environment. Our manipulation of the working conditions was such that teams were likely to experience varying degrees of stress during the manufacturing process and face problems and challenges that could be solved by means of innovation. Using a multi-level path analysis on a sample of 43 teams composed of 345 participants our findings revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between severity of exposure to stressors and team innovation. In turn, team innovation was negatively associated with team performance but positively with individual team member wellbeing in terms of enthusiasm. Our study contributes to the literature on the dark side of innovation by showing how stress-driven innovation is a paradoxical phenomenon that might be both beneficial and dysfunctional.