The Effects Of Informal Networks On R&D Team Creativity

In the knowledge economy times, as a key factor of production, knowledge has a huge role in economic growth. The realization of knowledge-based economic growth mainly depends on technological innovation in enterprises. Now R & D team has become the main organization form in enterprise technology innovation. For the R & D team creates new products, new processes, new technology, the importance of creativity are self-evident. Recently, with the rise of open innovation, compared with focusing on inspiring team members' creativity, enhancing R & D team creativity began to pay more attention to the team interaction and inside & outside resources collaboration. As a supplement to formal networks, informal networks' cross-functional background similarity, good communication and other characteristics, determines its good knowledge dissemination and interactive features. Thus, informal networks are key variable that affect R & D team creativity. However, so far domestic or foreign scholars do research about informal networks affecting team creativity are relatively few, also don't in-depth and systemic, it is necessary to study this topic with important theory value and practical significance in depth.This paper fully draws domestic and foreign research, depth studies the meaning, structure, measurement and relationship between informal networks, shared mental models, and team creativity, and build conceptual model, also put forward the corresponding research hypothesis. Based on data of 181 R & D teams, we do an empirical test by SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 17.0 software. Research result shows that no matter team internal informal networks or external informal networks both show an inverted U-function relationship with team creativity; team internal informal networks are significantly positively correlated with two type shared mental models(task-based ones and collaborative ones), and team external informal networks are significantly positively correlated with collaborative shared mental models; team internal informal networks influence team creativity by two type shared mental models' mediating effect, and team external informal networks influence team creativity by collaborative shared mental models' mediating effect.This paper integrates informal networks, shared mental models and team creativity into a framework to study. With innovation in theory, it also proposes suggestions to stimulate and improve the R & D team creativity from the perspective of building informal networks and integrating shared mental models, and it proposes important guiding to improve R & D team creativity.