Collective Team Identification And Team Creativity

In response to the rapidly changing marketing demands and the gradually diminishing demographic dividend in our country, organizations’ability to be creative has been increasingly emphasized due to its role in helping organizations to survive and thrive. Given that teams are able to organize and pool a wide range of informational resources, organizations are increasingly adopting teams as the basic work unit to perform creative tasks. Accordingly, team creativity is becoming one of the most heated topics in the research field. Numerous studies have focused on how to promote team creativity.To realize team creativity, three elements are considered by previous literature as indispensable. The first element is motivation, especially the intrinsic motivation, which brings teams cognitive endeavors and persistence. The second element is team diversity, which provides teams the amount of information and perspectives. Moreover, the third element for creativity is teams’cognitive capacities to handle the diverse information and perspectives. Most of the current literature on the antecedents of team creativity focus on the latter two elements, while the motivational factors are largely neglected. This is surprising considering that many studies have repeatedly demonstrated the essential role of motivation in shaping individual-level creativity. Because it is the motivational factors that determine how well teams process diverse information and conflicting ideas as well as the purpose of their information processing, I attempt to explore the relationship between team motivation and team creativity in the current study. By doing do, I aim to enrich the literature on predictors of team creativity by adding the motivation perspective.Based on social identity approach, I argue that collective team identification (CTI) plays the motivating role in shaping team creativity. CTI encourages team members to internalize teams’goals and fight for the teams’sake. Therefore, for the R&D teams, team members can be motivated by CTI to engage into the tremendous creative process. Along with this, members with high levels of CTI tend to trust their teammates more and value them more than those with low levels of CTI. Thus, highly identified members are more likely to pay attention to others’opinions, accept those opinions and finally synthesize them into a creative solution. In this way, CTI is very helpful to team information integration process and team creativity. In line with this thought. I designed the Study 1. In this study. CTI was hypothesized to improve team creativity by facilitating a team’s behavioral integration process. The results supported my hypotheses.1 found that behavioral integration mediated the relationship between CTI and team creativity. Moreover, I also found that the mediated effect was more significant when team tasks asked for less creative engagement.Although Study 1 supported the positive influence of CTI on team creativity, the relationship between the two is expected to be more complex than that Study 1 hypothesized. One the one hand. CTI encourage teams to internalize the collective goals. On the other hand, CTI. especially high levels of CTI. forces members to comply with the team prototypicality and norms. Being influenced by the same prototypicality and norms, the attitudes and behaviors of team members are becoming similar. As a result, there is a shortage of diverse informational resources in such teams, and team creativity will suffer. Study 2 was designed to examine this idea and the potential negative influence of CTI on team creativity. High levels of CTI are hypothesized to negatively influence members" individual differences, and would have a negative effect on external learning, team reflexivity, and team voice. But the above relationship was moderated by leader inclusiveness, which significantly sculptured the teams’norms and behavioral guidelines on how to respond to conflicting or creative ideas. The results in Study 2 indicated that when team leaders were not inclusive, CTI will influence external learning, team reflexivity, and team voice in an inverted U-shaped manner. Excess CTI actually decreased these three processes. I also hypothesized the mediating role of external learning, team reflexivity, and team voice in the relationship between CTI and team creativity. Only team voice was found to mediate the relationship significantly.Based on what I have found in Study 1 and Study 2, I propose a dual-pathway model to conclude the paradoxical findings of the relationship between CTI and team creativity. CTI is proposed to influence team creativity positively because it is conducive to the convergent information processing. On the contrary, CTI can impact team creativity negatively because excess CTI tampers with the divergent information processing. Given the importance of both convergent and divergent information processing on team creativity. I argue that we should examine the relationship between CTI and team creativity by simultaneously taking these two pathways into account. Study 3 was designed to test the dual-pathway model between CTI and team creativity. In study 3. I used exploitative learning to represent the convergent information processing, and exploratory learning to represent the divergent information processing, and hypothesized that CTI would influence these two pathways in different manners. At the same, team open-mindedness norm was also considered. We argued that the open-minedness norms could moderate the above relationship as well as the association between CTI and team creativity. The results showed that there was a positive relationship between CTI and exploitative learning, and the relationship between CTI and exploratory learning was moderated by the team open-mindedness norms. When teams were low in open-mindedness norms, CTI influenced exploratory learning in an inverted U-shaped way. Only the exploratory learning was founded to mediate the relationship between the interaction of CTI and open-mindedness norms and team creativity.These three studies contribute to the current literature because they have added a new type of predictors (CTI in this research) to team creativity, and, more importantly, extends the current framework for the antecedents of team creativity to incorporate team motivation. Second, I have made efforts to examine the relationship between CTI and team creativity, and attempted to address the paradoxical arguments about the influence of CTI on team creativity. A dual-pathway model between CTI and team creativity was proposed and examined by three studies. Future research are encouraged to use this model to organize more studies on the relationship between the two. Third, although researchers called on more studies to explore the negative influence of CTI, there have been few attempts until recently. Study 2 and Study 3 have depicted the potentially negative impact of CTI on team divergent information processing pathways and extended our understanding of the influence of CTI. Last but not least, I also have made some contributions to the team creative processes by proposing a framework (convergent information processing vs. divergent information processing) to organize the wide range of creative processes.Other practical implications and the directions for future research have also discussed.