Abstract
Since no specialized work has researched the relationship between team members’ hometown diversity (team hometown diversity) and team creativity, we investigated their underlying relationship by conducting a two-wave survey from 304 employees in 54 teams and 54 team leaders from 17 companies. The results proved that team hometown diversity was negatively related to both team information exchange and team creativity, while team information exchange was significantly positively associated with team creativity and the mediation effect of team information exchange between team hometown diversity and team creativity was verified. The moderation role of team identification in the relationship between team hometown diversity and team information exchange as well as the moderation function of team conformity on the relationship between team information exchange and team creativity were both verified. This work made at least four contributions. Firstly, it was among the first to research the impact of team hometown diversity on team creativity, which supplemented the gap and provided a new perspective for exploration of team creativity in future. Secondly, we adopted a two-wave design to check the dynamic impact of earlier team information exchange and team conformity on team creativity afterwards, which can be replicated for future studies. Thirdly, by using supervisor and subordinate ratings together and conducting electronic and paper surveys together, the results were more persuasive. Finally, we included a large dataset from a broad range of companies, which maximized the variables and generated our results. The implications and limitations were also illustrated.
Highlights
Team creativity is vital to organizational success [1] and sustainable development [2]
We found that team hometown diversity was negatively related to both team information exchange and team creativity, while team information exchange was significantly positive with team creativity, and the mediation effect of team information exchange between the relationship of team hometown diversity and team creativity was verified
This work provided a perspective that team hometown diversity was negatively related to team creativity while team information exchange was positively related to team creativity
Summary
Team creativity is vital to organizational success [1] and sustainable development [2]. Some scholars have proven that demographic diversity, such as age, gender, and ethnicity, impacts on team creativity in a negative way [5,18] as demographic diversity promotes subgroup categorization on the basis of similar attributes and can be detrimental for the interaction of new ideas and the generation of creative solutions [19,20]. People would like to treat ones with the same demographic attribute as one group and tend not to trust the others and the divergent thoughts of team members will not be exchanged, which could make communication difficult and cause conflict and mistrust [21,22], decreasing the potential for creative solutions [4]
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