Abstract
In modern organizations, creative work is usually carried out by teams, and the study of team creativity will therefore have meaningful implications for organization innovation research. The improvement of team creativity is a key management challenge for organization leaders. But our knowledge of how teams respond to and benefit from the supervisor’s developmental feedback is limited. This paper draws on the interdependence and knowledge density of team creativity to study how the supervisor’s developmental feedback influences creativity at the team level. Our statistical analysis of 94 supervisors and 330 employees finds that positive and negative development feedback from the supervisor both have a positive impact on team creativity, the impact from the negative development feedback is even stronger, and we also finds that the team’s harmonious innovation passion mediates the relationship between the supervisor’s developmental feedback and team creativity. In addition, we conclude that proactive personality activity moderates the relationship between the supervisor’s positive (negative) developmental feedback and the team’s harmonious innovation passion. Our research promotes the development of the study of team creativity in the Chinese cultural context and it is also an important application of developmental feedback that can be incorporated into management practices to enhance team creativity.
Highlights
Creativity enables organizations to innovate and maintain a competitive advantage in a complex and rapidly changing business world
Under certain conditions, Negative Supervisor Development Feedback (NSDF) has a stronger impact on Team Creativity (TC) than Positive Supervisor Development Feedback (PSDF)
When NSDF is matched and there is high Proactive Personality (PP) in a team, TC will be enhanced through Team Harmony Innovation Passion (THIP)
Summary
Creativity enables organizations to innovate and maintain a competitive advantage in a complex and rapidly changing business world. Chinese “face” culture (Mianzi Culture), which establishes a series of culturally appropriate behaviors and customs that relate to individual status, reinforces the tendency for Chinese supervisors to provide feedback to subordinates through positive means This raises the important question of how positive and negative SDF affects TC, which strongly depends on interactions among team members. The purpose of negative feedback is to correct employees’ bad or ineffective behavior (Zheng et al, 2015) Both positive and negative SDF enable development expectations to be conveyed from supervisors to employees, and they enable employees to establish individual innovative standards; it improves their creative capability, including the generation of creative ideas. Fodor and Carver, 2000; George and Zhou, 2001 Ford and Gioia, 2000; Fang et al, 2014; Vuori and Huy, 2016 Ilies and Judge, 2005; Van Dijk and Kluger, 2011 Jaussi and Dionne, 2003; Wang and Yan, 2010
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