Creative self-efficacy and individual creativity in team contexts: Cross-level interactions with team informational resources.

Abstract

We propose a cross-level perspective on the relation between creative self-efficacy and individual creativity in which team informational resources, comprising both shared "knowledge of who knows what" (KWKW) and functional background diversity, benefit the creativity of individuals more with higher creative self-efficacy. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a multi-level study with 176 employees working in 34 research and development teams of a multinational company in 4 countries. In support of our hypotheses, the link between creative self-efficacy and individual creativity was more positive with greater shared KWKW, and this interactive effect was pronounced for teams of high rather than low functional background diversity. We discuss implications for the study of creative self-efficacy in team contexts.

Keep the fire burning: Reciprocal gains of basic need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation and innovative work behaviour

“…Consequently, individuals who do not believe they are capable of dealing with the challenges that are associated with innovation attempts and fear that their efforts will be in vein are not likely to set and pursue innovative goals. This reasoning is consistent with literature on self-efficacy which has extensively documented the positive impact of a sense of competence on change-related behaviour such as creative and innovative activities (e.g., Beghetto, Kaufman, & Baxter, 2011;Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009;Michael, Hou, & Fan, 2011;Richter, Hirst, Van Knippenberg, & Baer, 2012;Tierney & Farmer, 2002.…”

Research on Workplace Creativity: A Review and Redirection

“…This includes the effects of job characteristics (e.g., Raja & Johns 2010), rewards (e.g., George & Zhou 2002), supervisory behaviors and leadership styles (e.g., Shin & Zhou 2003, Zhou et al 2012a, time pressure (e.g., Baer & Oldham 2006), social network characteristics (e.g., Baer 2010), organizational climate (e.g., Wang & Rode 2010), and support for creativity (e.g., Madjar et al 2002), to name just the most commonly studied factors. Interestingly, these boundary conditions not only are observed for somewhat remote actor-or context-level antecedents but also are frequently found for explicitly creativity-related, proximal antecedents such as creative personality (e.g., Zhou 2003) or creative self-efficacy (Richter et al 2012). Moreover, a substantial set of studies find that the effect of a certain antecedent is contingent on multiple actor and contextual influences.…”

Some Forcing Factors for Team Creativity at Team-Level

“…In theoretical implication, the main contribution of this study is thus to develop and test team characteristics so far missing in the study of individuals self-construal and team creativity. Individualistic self-construal has been found to relate to individual creativity, albeit the relation has not been confirmed in team creativity [6], hinting to the possibility of contextual factors facilitating or impeding the enactment of individual self-construal [2]. In practice implications, managers here is that designing jobs requirement of creativity to be multifaceted and to require flexibility and experimentation is a positive step toward promoting stronger individualistic self-construal among individuals [8].…”

“…This study extracts two important team contextual factors, team task required creativity and team time management, and one key factors of individual's cognition, individualistic self-construal. And then, this study explores the interactions with these critical contextual and individual's cognition variables in order to supplement the unknown how these activities relate to team characteristics, individuals' cognition, and creativity [2]. Therefore, after testing these propositions, thisstudywill provide several important implications for the researchof the team context, the individuals' factor, and team creativity.…”