PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear relationship between team informational faultlines and team creativity and the moderating effects of team humble leadership on the relationship.Design/methodology/approachThe multisource and longitudinal survey data were collected from 85 teams. The authors conducted linear regression analyses to analyze the data.FindingsThe results indicate that the relationship between team informational faultlines and team creativity is inverted U-shaped and such relationship is stronger in teams with low levels of humble leadership.Research limitations/implicationsThe research reconciles the mixed findings in prior research and enhances our understanding of the functionality of informational faultlines.Practical implicationsTeam managers should seek optimal levels of informational faultlines and make diversity coexist with similarity when assembling a new working group so as to utilize the benefits of team composition diversity and fuel collective creativity. Team leaders should learn humble leadership skills to encourage open communication.Originality/valueThe research is the first to adopt and build on the social information processing (SIP) perspective to explain the curvilinear relationship between team informational faultlines and team creativity.
Purpose
Based on the social dominance theory, this study aims to theorize the moderating effect of power disparity in the impact of team knowledge variety on team creativity and further to verify team open communication as the mediating mechanism of the aforementioned interactive effect.
Design/methodology/approach
The multisource (team members and their team leaders) and longitudinal (separated by four months) survey data were collected from 67 research and development teams in China to test the research model. The authors used multiple regression analyses to validate all the proposed hypotheses.
Findings
Results reveal that team knowledge variety has a more positive impact on team creativity when teams have lower power disparity. Besides, team open communication is significantly and positively related to team creativity and mediates the interactive effect of team knowledge variety and team power disparity on team creativity.
Originality/value
This study reconciles the mixed findings in the previous study and provides new insights regarding the functionality of team knowledge variety. By identifying team power disparity as a moderator in shaping the effects of team knowledge variety, the authors extend the research that explores the moderators of the team knowledge variety–team creativity relationship, and make comprehensive consideration of the coexistence of multiple diversities within teams (i.e. knowledge variety and power disparity) and their joint effects on team creativity. Besides, this research identifies team open communication as an important underlying mechanism in transmitting the interactive effects of two different types of diversities on team creativity, thus offering new insights on how teams can perform creatively.
During the corona virus disease of 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic, employees have begun to lack a sense of cognitive detachment from their work. Furthermore, employees with high creativity are better able to help their organizations to survive the economic decline caused by this pandemic. However, scholars currently know relatively little about how and why cognitive detachment influences employee creativity. Leveraging boundary theory and a dual pathway to creativity model (DPCM), the present study hypothesized that cognitive detachment from work will influence employee creativity in an inverse U‐shaped pattern, with cognitive flexibility as a mediator and the boundary condition of intrinsic motivation for creativity being included. Our results, which were gained from a sample of 304 research and development (R&D) employees, indicate that employees' cognitive detachment from work and their degree of creativity possess a curvilinear relationship and that cognitive flexibility is a likely mediator between them. Notably, this inverse U‐shaped relationship is significant only if the employees have high intrinsic motivation for creativity. This study uncovers the complicated influence of cognitive detachment from work on individual creativity, while also investigating the underlying cognitive processes (i.e., cognitive flexibility) involved and the importance of intrinsic motivation.
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