Affect Team Creativity Research Articles

The dual effects of task conflict on team creativity

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the dual effects of task conflict on team creativity and the role of team-focused transformational leadership (TFL) as a key contingency in the task conflict–team creativity relationship.Design/methodology/approachData were collected from 325 teams across ten large companies in South Korea. The study tested the hypothesized moderated mediation model using an SPSS macro (PROCESS, Hayes, 2008).FindingsResults showed that task conflict is directly and positively related to team creativity and is negatively and indirectly related to team creativity via relationship conflict. Furthermore, the study found that team-focused TFL moderates all paths through which task conflict affects team creativity. Specifically, team-focused TFL enhances the positive direct effect of task conflict and alleviates the negative indirect effects of task conflict on team creativity.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough this study could not test the causal chains of the proposed relationships owing to a cross-sectional nature of data, the present research provides theoretical implications for the conflict, leadership and team creativity literatures. The study highlights the role of transformational leadership in the process through which team conflict is managed so as to increase team creativity.Practical implicationsTo capitalize on the creativity-related benefits associated with task conflict, managers will need to pay attention to the role they can play and their leadership that emphasizes collective goals and identity. Managers and team leaders are also expected to intervene in conflict situations to minimize the harmful effect of task conflict that may take place owing to the association between task conflict and relationship conflict.Social implicationsThe findings will have implications for any social contexts where people work together toward common goals. In such contexts, the study emphasizes the role of leadership in teams to use the creative potential associated with different opinions and values regarding what and how work to be completed.Originality/valueThe study’s examination of the dual paths through which task conflict affects team creativity brings insights into why the impact of task conflict on team creativity has been inconsistent or unclear in past research. This paper also articulates a leader’s role in teams in relation to managing team conflict to increase team creativity.

A Social Network View of Team Conflict-Creativity Relationships: Explicating the Who, When, and How

Scholars have long argued that within-team conflict can meaningfully affect team creativity, with relationship conflict generally seen as having a negative influence and task conflict a more complicated influence. Yet, prior investigations are limited in that conflict is predominantly conceptualized as members’ shared perceptions of the overall conflict in a team, thereby assuming that all members experience similar levels of conflict and/or all conflict in the team exerts equal influence. Breaking from this approach, we employ a social network perspective to conceptualize conflict as a dyadic phenomenon and, moreover, argue that critical members’ conflict with others explains additional variance in team creativity beyond overall team conflict. Drawing from the dual-pathway to creativity theory and motivated information processing theory, we posit that a critical member’s task conflict enhances team creativity by increasing team reflexivity and, further, that this positive indirect effect is accentuated by a team’s shared goals. Separately, we posit that a critical member’s relationship conflict hinders team creativity via reduced team cohesion, though this negative indirect effect is mitigated by the critical member’s emotional intelligence. A field study of 314 employees in 70 new product development teams lends support for most of the hypotheses.

The role of knowledge sharing and LMX to enhance employee creativity in theme park work team

PurposeThis paper aims to empirically test individual, team and multi-level relationships among knowledge sharing (KS), leader–member exchange (LMX), employee creativity (EC) and team innovation (TI). The study tests how KS affects EC via LMX at lower and multi levels. At a higher level, how creativity affects TI is also tested.Design/methodology/approachQuestionnaires were sent to 43 team leaders and 215 team members from the largest theme park in Taiwan, E-DA, who are engaged in offering creative and innovative customer services. Multilevel analysis was conducted based on the questionnaires received.FindingsMajor findings agree the contention that KS can improve EC via LMX at both employee and multi-level. The results also indicate that KS affects team creativity (TC) at the team level; however, TC and TI do not have a significant positive relationship.Originality/valueThe study examined how to enhance employees’ creativity from the individual and team levels in a theme park, an area with rare literature. The authors found that LMX is an important mediator between KS and EC. The mediated effect of KS on EC through LMX is higher in a cross level than individual level. In addition, a team’s KS has more effect on EC than the individual level.

Drawing Snow White and Animating Buzz Lightyear: Technological Toolkit Characteristics and Creativity in Cross-Disciplinary Teams

The use of technological tools to execute creative tasks is pervasive within cross-disciplinary teams, yet little attention has been paid to their role in influencing team creativity. In particular, no research has focused on how the characteristics of a team’s technological toolkit—the set of technological tools a team can draw upon to construct its actions—can affect team creativity. I propose that considering the toolkit, rather than just isolated tools, and the multiple functions played by tools is critical to understanding how technology characteristics influence team creativity. I hypothesize that creativity in cross-disciplinary teams is influenced by the size and field diffusion of the team toolkit, with size having a curvilinear relationship with creativity, and diffusion having a positive relationship. Moreover, I hypothesize that these effects will be attenuated when the number of team members who are experts with the focal tool is high. I test and find support for these hypotheses in a study set in the context of the Hollywood animation industry, a knowledge-intensive industry characterized by the presence of cross-disciplinary teams using a variety of technological tools. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Search and Interactive Recombination: Does social hierarchy affect team creativity?

Does team social hierarchy influence the creation of new-to-the-firm knowledge? We propose that social hierarchy determines a team’s ability to engage in interactive recombination, a key source of divergent ideas, and submit that time-spanning search provides an alternative mechanism through which divergent ideas are generated. We argue that social hierarchy exhibits a U-shaped relationship with divergent idea generation and proffer that the effectiveness of time-spanning search is affected by team social hierarchy. Using patent data from the semiconductor industry, we find support for our theory. By introducing social hierarchy as a factor that affects divergent idea generation, we combine innovation studies with the social psychology of creativity and deepen understanding of the importance of team composition and interaction for idea generation.

Why do high-performance human resource practices matter for team creativity? The mediating role of collective efficacy and knowledge sharing

Drawing on the ability-motivation-opportunity framework, we develop a multilevel model examining the relationship between high-performance human resource practices and team creativity. Based on an input-process-output perspective, we hypothesize that both ability-enhancing human resource practices and motivation-enhancing practices affect team creativity via team efficacy, while motivation-enhancing practices and opportunity-enhancing practices affect team creativity via knowledge sharing. We verify our hypotheses using data collected from 16 Chinese companies involving 80 work teams. The results show that team efficacy mediates the relationship between ability-enhancing practices and team creativity, and knowledge sharing mediates the relationship between motivation-enhancing practices and team creativity. Theoretical and practical implications for human resource management practices and team creativity are discussed.

Conflict and creativity in inter-organizational teams

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the effects of task and relationship conflicts on team creativity, and the moderating role of shared leadership in inter-organizational teams. An inter-organizational team normally comprises employees from collaborated organizations brought together to conduct an initiative, such as product development. Practitioners and researchers have witnessed the prevalence of conflict in inter-organizational teams. Despite significant scholarly investigation into the importance of conflict in creativity, a deep theoretical understanding of conflict framework remains elusive.Design/methodology/approachA questionnaire survey was conducted in China to collect data. Consequently, 54 teams, which comprised 54 team managers and 276 team members, were deemed useful for the study.FindingsBy testing our hypotheses on 54 inter-organizational teams, we found that relationship conflict has a negative relationship with team creativity, whereas task conflict has an inverted U-shaped (curvilinear) relationship with team creativity. Furthermore, when shared leadership is stronger, the negative relationship with team creativity is weaker for relationship conflict, whereas the inverted U-shaped relationship with team creativity is stronger for task conflict.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitation is cross-sectional, which cannot establish causality in relationships. Despite this potential weakness, the present research provides insights into conflict, leadership and inter-organizational collaboration literature.Practical implicationsThe findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.Social implicationsManagers are struggling to identify ways to effectively manage team conflict when a team of diverse individuals across organizational boundaries are brought together to solve a problem. The findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.Originality/valueThis paper provides understandings about how relationship and task conflicts affect team creativity in inter-organizational teams.

The Curvilinear Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Team Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Faultlines

In this study, we built and tested a theoretical model to determine how ethical leadership affects team creativity among teams composed of different characteristics. Following social learning theory and an antecedent–benefit–cost framework, we conducted analyses of multisource data from 50 team supervisors and 186 employees, which revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity. The teams exhibited more creativity when there was a moderate level of ethical leadership than when there were very low or very high levels. Moreover, from an interactional perspective, we found that team faultlines significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more significant among teams with weak team faultlines. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Inspiring Creativity in Teams: Perspectives of Transactive Memory Systems

Team psychological safety — a non-threatening and safe climate — allows team members to express and share each other's opinions freely, and this sharing may produce more useful perspectives to induce team creativity. In a psychologically safe climate, transactive memory systems (TMSs) may be constructed for describing the specialised division of cognitive labour for solving information problems and thereby enabling team members to quickly gain and use knowledge across domains. As a consequence, further ideas may be generated within teams, increasing team creativity. Our research model is assessed using data from a sample of 110 team members from 40 research and development (R&D) teams in a leading technology company in Taiwan and analysed using the partial least squares method. The results of this study reveal that: (1) team psychological safety did not directly affect team creativity, (2) team psychological safety affects TMSs, (3) TMSs affect team creativity, and (4) TMSs fully mediate the relationship between team psychological safety and team creativity. This study also discusses the implications for team creativity.

팀 다양성과 과업난이도가 팀 창의성에 미치는 영향 : 다중 에이전트 시뮬레이션 접근방법을 중심으로

In the management literature, it has been widely accepted among both researchers and practitioners that the level of team creativity is significantly related to the organizational performance. Besides, researchers posited with confidence that team diversity and task difficulty would affect team creativity through team members' activities of exploration and exploitation. However, empirical approaches to proving this belief suffered from lack of real data and proper methods as well. To tackle the research void like this, we propose a multi-agent simulation (MAS) mechanism. By adopting a set of parameters which validity were proven in the related literature, we conducted a series of experiments in the environment of the MAS platform named NetLogo. There sults suggest that managers can differentiate team diversity strategies according to task difficulty. In the case of a difficult task, managers need to increase team diversity so that their teams can maximize team creativity through rigorous exploration and exploitation. It is desirable to maintain an average level of team diversity when performing an easy task.

自我协调与员工创造力的关系研究

研究基于自我决定理论，探讨自我协调与员工创造力的关系。运用分层线性模型，对来自不同行业83个团队449名员工的问卷数据进行分析，结果表明：1) 自我协调能有效预测员工创造力；2) 创造力自我效能感对自我协调与员工创造力的关系存在部分中介作用；3) 团队成员与领导者情感信任水平的提高，增强自我协调与创造力自我效能感、员工创造力的间接效应。探讨自我协调与员工创造力的关系可以为甄别影响员工创造力的个体因素提供理论指导。在未来的研究中可以进一步探讨自我协调等作为团队层次变量对团队创造力的影响作用，也可能存在其他重要的情境变量调节自我协调与创造力之间的关系(如团队安全氛围)。 On the basis of the self-determination theory, this study examined the relationship between the self-concordance and employee creativity. The participants involved 449 employees in 83 teams from different companies in China and the theoretical hypotheses were tested by hierarchical linear modeling. The results showed that 1) self-concordance had positive effects on employee creativity; 2) creative self-efficacy had a mediate effect between self-concordance and employee creativity; 3) affected-based trust in leader had a positive significant moderation effect between self- concordance and employee creativity. Also, affected-based trust in leader had a positive moderation role between self-concordance and creative self-efficacy. The research on the relationship between self-concordance and employee creativity can provide theoretical guidance to identify the individual factors that affect employee creativity. Finally, in the future study, we can explore self- concordance as a team variable affects team creativity. Other team variables (e.g., team security climate) may also affect the relationship between self-concordance and employee creativity.

Student Team Creativity in Information System Development: Social Capital Perspective

Creative teams can help software companies to grow and to obtain advantage. It is important for contemporary educational units to increase student team creativity in information system development and provide training for student teams to product creative results. A survey design was selected to collect data and test the proposed model. Thirty-six teams (204 students) enrolling in an information system department project training course that required three semesters of project-based lessons were investigated. To test our specific hypotheses, Partial least squares method was used. This study analyzes the creativity of student teams participating in an information system development project and examines antecedents of their creativity. The results find structural and relational capital positively influence knowledge sharing. Cognitive capital negatively influences knowledge sharing. And knowledge sharing positively affects team creativity. This study also demonstrates that knowledge sharing significantly mediates the effect of social capital on team creativity. Whilst this study explores issues in team creativity for information systems development student teams, some suggestions are made for educational designers using similar activities in other disciplines. Educational designers should define clear work processes for information system development student teams establish explicit functional role and division of labor for team members, and design information system development activities/tasks that require interactions among team members.

Translating Team Creativity to Innovation Implementation

This study investigated team innovation as a process phenomenon by differentiating the creativity stage from the implementation stage. Based on the interactional approach, the authors argue that team composition (aggregated individual creative personality and functional heterogeneity) affects team creativity, which in turn promotes innovation implementation depending on the team’s climate for innovation. Results from a study of 96 primary care teams confirmed that aggregated individual creative personality, as well as functional heterogeneity, promotes team creativity, which in turn interacts with climate for innovation such that team creativity enhances innovation implementation only when climate for innovation is high.

When is educational specialization heterogeneity related to creativity in research and development teams? Transformational leadership as a moderator.

The authors examined conditions under which teams' educational specialization heterogeneity was positively related to team creativity. Using a sample of 75 research and development teams, the authors theorized and found that transformational leadership and educational specialization heterogeneity interacted to affect team creativity in such a way that when transformational leadership was high, teams with greater educational specialization heterogeneity exhibited greater team creativity. In addition, teams' creative efficacy mediated this moderated relationship among educational specialization heterogeneity, transformational leadership, and team creativity. The authors discuss the implications of these results for research and practice.