Translating proactive and responsive creativity to innovation implementation: The roles of internal and external team behaviours for implementation

Abstract

Given that unrealized ideas are useless, this study focuses on how and when creative ideas are implemented in work teams. Specifically, we propose that teams' creative ideas based on proactive and responsive motivation activate different internal and external team behaviours to affect their innovation implementation. A sample of 68 teams from US organizations reveals that teams can easily mobilize internal team cooperation during implementation when they proactively generate creative ideas. However, such teams have difficulty securing external resources. Teams that generate ideas responsively have advantages in acquiring external resources but experience difficulty in developing internal team cooperation needed for implementation. Thus, teams with proactive and responsive creativity show positive and negative effects on innovation implementation via internal team cooperation and external resource acquisition. The negative effects mitigate when support for implementation and innovation incentive exists. The present analysis explores an important but largely neglected phenomenon of the connection between idea generation and implementation in teams and offers new theoretical and practical insights into the underlying mechanisms of realizing the benefit of team creativity.