Team innovation is an important factor for organizational effectiveness. However, fostering innovation in teams remains a major challenge for team leaders. In particular, we still have an incomplete understanding of (1) the effects of team‐centric leadership and (2) the role of teamwork for the relationship between leadership and innovation and learning. Integrating team‐centric transformational leadership and the teamwork quality (TWQ) model with frameworks for team innovation, the current study addresses this issue. Specifically, we investigated TWQ as a team‐level mediator of the relationship between team‐centric transformational leadership, team innovation, and individual members’ learning. We tested our hypotheses using lagged, multi‐source data from a sample of 79 scientific teams. Our findings show that team‐centric transformational leadership is positively related to both team innovation and individual members' learning. Furthermore, the positive relationship between team‐centric transformational leadership and learning is mediated by specific aspects of TWQ. Our study helps to clarify the processes underlying the effects of team‐centric leadership on innovation and learning.
Practitioner points
Innovation and learning are crucial drivers of success in organizations in knowledge‐intensive industries such as science. Transformational leadership is a key factor for enhancing innovation and learning in scientific teams.
By engaging in team‐centric transformational leadership behaviours including emphasizing group identity, communicating a group vision, and fostering team‐building, scientific team leaders can improve innovation and learning
However, leaders of scientific teams should also be aware of potential negative effects of high team cohesion on team innovation, because it may undermine divergent thinking and critical discussions in teams.
Working in academia entails many challenges including rejections by journals, competition for funding or jobs, and uncertain job outlooks (for non-tenure staff), which can result in poor mental health and well-being. Previous studies have suggested self-compassion as a resource for mental health and well-being, but to date no study has been published that has tested interventions targeting self-compassion in academia. In this weekly diary study, 317 academics from Germany, Switzerland, and the US were asked to recall a negative event and were then randomly assigned to either a self-compassionate writing intervention, a three good things intervention, or an active control intervention, respectively. They also completed two surveys on four consecutive Thursdays measuring state positive and negative affect and job-related well-being (i.e., job satisfaction and work engagement). Using multi-level regression modelling, results showed that participants in the self-compassion condition reported more job satisfaction and work engagement due to experiencing less negative affect. Academics in the three good things condition showed no such effects. Results indicated that self-compassion in academia is a resource that enables emotion-oriented coping during difficult times or in challenging situations that may benefit academics’ job-related well-being. The study highlights both the importance of discussing well-being in academia and ways to strengthen it.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.