Creativity In Work Teams Research Articles

Correction to: Leading via virtual communication: a longitudinal field experiment on work team creativity in an extreme context

Correction to: Leading via virtual communication: a longitudinal field experiment on work team creativity in an extreme context

Leading via virtual communication: a longitudinal field experiment on work team creativity in an extreme context

COVID-19 has prompted diverse responses from governments and created an extreme context for organizations to operate. In this context, company leaders face fluctuated macrolevel policies, endure physical separation from their members, and must rely on virtual communication to conduct teamwork. Yet little is known about what and how leader communication can be effective in inducing team creativity to survive the extreme context. Building on the affective events theory and the literature on media richness, we develop a theoretical model explicating how leaders’ rich (as opposed to lean) virtual communication can mitigate the negative impact of stringent government responses to COVID-19 on work team creativity via a sequential mediation process: first by inhibiting team anxiety and then by facilitating team information elaboration. Data from a three-stage eight-day longitudinal field experiment, in combination with an experience sampling method with 251 employees, on a chain preschool in eight Chinese cities, provide strong support for the hypothesized model.

Virtual Leadership in the Age of Social Distancing: A Field Experiment on Work Team Creativity

The extending lockdown and social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic create an extreme context in which leaders must respond to threats of severe physical, psychological, or material consequences to organizational members. Building on affective events theory and the media richness literature, we develop a theoretical model explicating how virtual leadership in an extreme context can promote team creativity by reducing team anxiety elicited by extreme events, which in turn facilitating team information elaboration. Data from a three-stage longitudinal field experiment, in combination with an experience sampling method on 251 employees in 32 teams across 12 preschools in the extreme context of lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic provide strong support for the hypothesized sequential mediation effect between virtual leadership and team creativity. Our findings have significant theoretical and practical implications on virtual leadership and work team management.

How cultural tightness relates to creativity in work teams: Exploring the moderating and mediating mechanisms

In the present study, we examined the team‐level association between cultural tightness, justice and creativity under varying levels of collectivism. Utilizing data from a field sample of 532 employees distributed across 147 work teams in 13 organizations, we demonstrated that cultural tightness was negatively related to team creativity for teams with lower levels of collectivism, but we did not observe such clear effects in teams with higher levels of collectivism. Finally, our results indicated that team justice climate (i.e., the average justice perception within the team) mediated the relationship between cultural tightness and team creativity in teams with lower levels of collectivism. Our findings accentuate the importance of understanding how norm‐based (i.e., cultural tightness) and value‐based (i.e., team collectivism) cultural dimensions jointly impact upon team creativity and suggest that managers should consider the optimal configuration of cultural dimensions if creativity is vital to their work team's functioning.

Do They Pay Back My Knowledge? Generalized Reciprocity of Knowledge and Creativity in Work Teams

The role of knowledge management behavior (KMB) toward individual creative performance remains unclear. We draw on social exchange theory and propose that KMBs of a focal member, such as knowledge sharing and hiding, can predict his/her own creativity to the extent that such behaviors are reciprocated by other members in work teams. Two studies were conducted. Study 1 was an online simulation experiment with 718 participants from the US. Study 2 was a field survey based on a sample of 169 team members and 50 team leaders from Taiwanese and South Korean organizations. Results revealed that in one-to-many relationships in a work team setting characterized by generalized reciprocity, KMBs of a focal member is not always significantly reciprocated by the same KMBs of other members (Study 1). However, KMB reciprocation become significant when team members interact continuously with a focal member and have formed an understanding of the focal member’s social values (Studies 1 and 2). The between-person knowledge sharing (hiding) reciprocation is strengthened when a focal member has collectivistic (individualistic) values (Studies 1 and 2), and this moderated relationship was mediated by the internal attribution of a focal members’ KMB (Study 1). In addition, the relationship between knowledge sharing of a focal member and his/her own creativity is significantly mediated by the reciprocated knowledge sharing of other members toward the focal member (Study 2). This study draws on generalized reciprocity in work teams to clarify the underlying mechanism of the relationship between KMBs and creativity at the individual level.

Passing Creativity from Leaders to Followers: Cascading Effect of Creative Self-Efficacy

Based on social cognitive theory, this paper explores the relationship between creative efficacy and creativity in work teams by integrating the cascading effect of leader's creative self- efficacy...

Take it to the Next Level: Proactive Personality and Creativity in Work Teams

Proactive personality has gained its popularity in organizational behavior research for its motivational function in human agency, which is needed for addressing emergency, bringing changes and better adaptation to the environment both for the individual and the organization. Given that teams have become a common form in performing tasks for many modern organizations, and that teams often incorporate more complex interpersonal influences and interactions, it is informative to move the individual level of proactive personality research to team level. This symposium extends proactive personality research by presenting four studies that apply social network and person-environment interaction perspectives and constructs to model the effect of team proactive personality compositions and structures embedded in a team context on team and individual creativity. New light is shed on how the structural features of proactive personality may drive outcomes based on different compositions among members or between the team and the leader. Also, how individual member may be facilitated or inhabited under certain team level composition of proactive personality. In addition, this symposium also breaks new grounds with respect to the mechanisms (e.g., job redesign activities, social exchanges and in turn team motivational states) through which team proactive personality exert its effects on team outcomes under the regulations of team network structure. By drawing together and discussing the perspectives and insights of these four papers, this symposium will contribute to a thorough and integrated understanding of the effects of team congruence in proactive personality between team members, between team and the leader, as well as the conceptualization and operations of team level proactive personality. Besides identifying future research needs, this symposium may also have empirical implications for organizations that may benefit from the findings in building up teams and assigning leaders according to the feature of the team. Team-Leader Congruence in Proactive Personality and Team Creativity Presenter: Nan Wang; National U. of Singapore Presenter: Jing Zhang; U. of Houston Proactive Employees as Job Crafters: Proactive Personality and Employee Creativity in Work Teams Presenter: Xin-Ming Tian; Shanghai JiaoTong U. Presenter: Jessica Juhun Song; LG Economic Research Institute

A Multi-Level Analysis of Structuring Human Resource Management Processes and Creativity in Teams

This cross-level study examines of whether and why structuring of human resource management (HRM) processes may hinder or facilitate employee creativity in work teams. It is posited that the link b...

Proactive Personality and Employee Creativity in Work Teams: Examining a Multilevel Model (WITHDRAWN)

Using the theoretical frameworks offered by work design, proactive personality and creativity, this study investigated the mechanism by which team mean level of proactive personality influences emp...

Looking at Both Sides of the Social Exchange Coin: A Social Cognitive Perspective on the Joint Effects of Relationship Quality and Differentiation on Creativity

We propose a cross-level contingent process model based on social cognitive theory to explain how and when the quality of social exchange relationships with a supervisor (leader-member exchange; LMX) and fellow team members (team-member exchange; TMX) affect individual creativity in work teams. Using longitudinal, multisource data for 828 employees on 116 teams, we found LMX and TMX had unique indirect effects on employee creativity via self-efficacy. Further, moderated path analysis revealed LMX differentiation attenuated LMX quality's direct effect on self-efficacy and indirect effect on creativity, whereas TMX differentiation augmented TMX quality's direct effect on self-efficacy and indirect effect on creativity.