Under the circumstances where there has been an increasing complexity and uncertainty of business environments, group and team creativity that produces creative and innovative results has never been more emphasized in its value. Despite its importance, however, existing studies on team creativity either merely rely on the creativity of individuals that belong to certain teams or limit themselves to a portion of group and circumstantial attributes. Furthermore, there has been a lack of empirical researches due to the burden imposed by team research and the complexity of its methodological process.
This study firstly attempts to investigate the influence that a variety of antecedents, including creativity of individual team members, team diversity, team cohesion, team autonomy, team efficacy and empowering leadership, have on team creativity.
Second, it intends to investigate the mediation effect of team efficacy in the relationships established between the antecedents and team creativity.
Third, it aims to verify the moderated mediation effect of empowering leadership that occurs in the relationship between the antecedents, team efficacy and team creativity.
In order to reach such objectives, certain research model and its corresponding hypothesis have been built based on the theoretical framework of influence factors for team creativity and the earlier studies in the field.
In this study, a survey has been carried out on 633 personnel working in the five R&D organizations of ICT(Information and Communication Technology) field. As a result, a set of data for research has been collected from 533 respondents, among which the valid data that corresponds to 521 individuals of 102 teams has been selected for the final analysis.
Questions regarding the independent variables of team creativity are designed to be answered by team members. And those regarding the dependent variables, team creativity in this case, are answered by not only the members themselves but also the leaders who manage respective teams, reaching a comparative analysis on these two group models.
Various related methods are employed in this study to verify the hypothesis, such as multiple hierarchical regression analysis, bootstrapping, moderated mediation regression analysis, etc. The analytic tools for such process include SPSS 22.0, SPSS PROCESS(macro) 2.15, A-mos 22.0 among others.
The results of this study are summarized as follows.
First, the analysis on the effect that the lower dimension of the creativity of individual team members has towards team creativity demonstrated that its influence was positively significant throughout the whole process. To be specific, team members who had greater experience in knowledge and experience, creativity thinking skills and intrinsic task motivation have been shown to contribute to team creativity in a more positive way. In addition, given that the lower dimension of individual creativity was combined into a single factor, the influence on team creativity was still significant.
Second, team diversity, team cohesion, team autonomy, team efficacy and empowering leadership had a positively significant influence on team creativity.
Third, as it was the result from the above research on team creativity responded by the leaders, the influence factors for team creativity responded by team members had an equally positively significant outcome.
Forth, the analysis on the mediating effect demonstrated that team efficacy possesses certain qualities in positively mediating the relationship between the knowledge and experience of team members, creative thinking skills, team diversity and team autonomy on team creativity.
However, despite its previous predictions, the significant mediating effect of intrinsic task motivation and team cohesion was not found.
Fifth, on the other hand, the responses collected from team members revealed that team efficacy had mediating effect in the relationship between all the variables and team creativity.
Finally, in the moderated mediation effect analysis of empowering leadership, the indirect effect where team autonomy influences team creativity through team efficacy was more positive when the empowering leadership was at high.
However, in the rest of the variables, no moderated mediation effect was found. On the other hand, the responses from the team members confirmed a moderated mediation effect of team cohesion.
Therefore, in order to promote team creativity it is necessary to improve creativity of individual team members, team diversity, team cohesion, team autonomy and team efficacy as predictor variables and also to enhance team creativity through empowering leadership. In such process, it is expected that policies within an organization be established taking into account the interaction effect by both team autonomy and team cohesion with empowering leadership.
Based on these results, the study also examines the implications of the research in theoretical and managerial perspectives as well as possible limitations that it may bear, according to which several suggestions are made in regards to the potential direction of future research.