The curvilinear relationship between team familiarity and team innovation: A secondary data analysis

Abstract

Paradoxical arguments and mixed empirical evidence coexist in the current literature concerning the relationship between team familiarity and team innovation. To resolve this contradiction, we apply habitual routines theory to propose that team familiarity and team innovation have an inverted U-shaped relationship. Using a data set of 68,933 R&D teams in the electrical engineering industry, our results support a nonlinear relationship between team familiarity and team innovation, and suggest that the best innovative performance is produced by moderately familiar teams. Furthermore, we find that external learning can moderate this curvilinear relationship. Theoretical contributions and future implications are discussed.

Does Member Familiarity Help or Hinder Innovation? The Roles of Expertise and Dialogic Coordination

“…Our findings help to illuminate why member familiarity may produce mixed resultspositive and negative effects-on the ability of innovation task forces to successfully generate innovative solutions. Our coordination perspective characterizes member familiarity as a double-4 edged sword and helps to reconcile contradictory prior research [7], [12], [17] by suggesting that both high and low degrees of member familiarity can help to produce innovative solutions, depending on the form of coordination used. Our research contributes to the understanding of coordination in innovation task forces.…”

Facilitators and inhibitors for integrating expertise diversity in innovation teams: The case of plasmid exchange in molecular biology

“…The negative effect might be that successful teams are more likely to start new projects in the same constellation but the new projects are less likely to be of the same quality as the previous ones. Indeed, studies on team familiarity show a detrimental effect (Sieweke & Zhao, 2015;Ziller, Behringer, & Goodchilds, 1962), especially of very high degrees of familiarity (Xie, Ji, Luan, & Zhao, 2020). Since our proxy for prior experience reflects identical team member compositions, the negative effect is to be expected.…”

A Multilevel Review of Curvilinear Effects on the Creative Work of Teams

“…Furthermore, in the context of new product development, Moorman’s (1995) measurement of product creativity is commonly used to make inferences about the creative performance of teams tasked with research and development (e.g., Dayan & Di Benedetto, 2011; Dayan et al, 2017; Tang & Marinova, 2020). Finally, the creative performance of teams assigned to creative tasks is also assessed via the number (e.g., De Dreu, 2006; Vestal & Mesmer-Magnus, 2020; Xie et al, 2020) and/or novelty of ideas and products they produce (e.g., Lee et al, 2015; Seo et al, 2020; Tzabbar & Vestal, 2015). In some cases, this is done by inviting trained coders to evaluate team outputs (e.g., Baer et al, 2010; Goncalo et al, 2010; Mannucci, 2017).…”

“…The same patterns are seen with collective expertise that is broad (Mannucci, 2017; Schulze & Brojerdi, 2012), diverse (Lee et al, 2015), or unshared (Vestal & Mesmer-Magnus, 2020). While international experience shows U-shaped effects (Suh & Badrinarayanan, 2014), inverted U-shaped effects are seen for team familiarity (Xie et al, 2020) and knowledge sharing (Tang & Marinova, 2020), arguably because trust (Hendarsjah et al, 2019) and psychological safety within teams (Kostopoulos & Bozionelos, 2011) show similar effects. Finally, collaboration within and beyond team boundaries also affects the creative work of teams in an inverted U-shaped fashion.…”

“…Although the extant literature shows that certain antecedents affect the creative work of individuals and teams in curvilinear ways, the reasons for this remain to be explored. This is mainly due to the fact that only a few of the reviewed studies (e.g., Mo et al, 2019; Park et al, 2017; Xie et al, 2020; Zhang & Zhou, 2019) explicitly theorize about the associated costs that may outweigh an antecedent’s benefits by referring to the work by Pierce and Aguinis (2013) or the ABC framework by Busse et al (2016).…”