Team Members’ Resilience and the Emergence of Team Resilience as Drivers of Innovation Performance

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Resilience — the capacity to bounce back from adversity — is critical for innovation. However, most studies have examined resilience and its positive effects for innovation performance at the individual level, which does not fully capture the organizational reality of individuals working together in teams. By following core tenets of conservation of resources theory, we ask whether resilient individuals also build a more resilient and, eventually, a more innovative team. To address this critical question, we conduct a three-wave study of 58 newly formed innovation teams with 169 individuals and external performance ratings. Specifically, we examine whether the average level of members’ individual resilience initially available to their teams translates into innovation team performance via team resilience as an emergent state later in the process. We further test whether this indirect effect is contingent on teams’ collective exposure to setbacks. The results support our theorizing that only when there is little exposure to setbacks early in the project, team members’ average resilience capacities relate to innovation team performance via team resilience. We conclude that resilient individuals do not necessarily make resilient teams because the experience of intense setbacks in early project phases tend to inhibit team members’ resilience capacities to materialize in team resilience and innovation team performance. Our findings contribute to current discussions on the emergence of team resilience as a critical process in innovation teams.