Entrepreneurial Team Knowledge Diversity and Creativity: A Multilevel Analysis of Knowledge Sharing, Individual Creativity, and Team Creativity

Abstract

Although the academic community has consistent with the key role of entrepreneurial team knowledge diversity (ETKD), which serves as a critical catalyst of creativity in organizations, the extant research on the link between knowledge diversity and creativity is mainly concerned with individual creativity in single-level analyses. With emerging entrepreneurial ventures increasingly relying on innovation enhancement in the form of teams, there is research motivation to explore how team-level creativity develops. In this sense, this study attempts to investigate the underlying mechanism through which ETKD is associated with team-level creativity. Through a multilevel mediation model, this study proposes that ETKD can facilitate team creativity (TC) sequentially transmitted through individual-level team members' knowledge sharing (KS) and creativity. Based on a survey of 252 team members from 42 entrepreneurial teams in China, multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) is applied to test the top–down relationship between ETKD and KS, as well as the bottom-up link between individual creativity and TC. The findings show that our hypotheses are supported. Our findings provide some of the first empirical evidence to examine how knowledge-based diversity of entrepreneurial teams facilitates TC potential by multilevel approach. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also offered.

Factors Influencing the Creativity of Chinese Upper-Secondary-School Students Participating in Programming Education

“…Anything new arises from creativity ( Noh and Lee, 2020 ). Creativity is the ability to create new products or ideas that are valuable and useful ( Woodman et al, 1993 ; Shalley et al, 2016 ; Qiang et al, 2020 ; Hou et al, 2021 ; Zhang et al, 2021 ). Generally, this ability is reflected in behaviors such as inventing, designing, inventing, creating, and planning ( Guilford, 1950 ) and is characterized by fluency, flexibility, novelty, and refinement ( Kupers et al, 2018 ; Kim et al, 2019 ; Rao et al, 2021 ) and is the result of the interaction between capacity, process and environment results ( Gu et al, 2021 ).…”

Managing the negative impact of workforce diversity: The important roles of inclusive HRM and employee learning-oriented behaviors

“…The diversity literature uncovered some beneficial effects of workforce diversity on individuals (e.g., creativity and inspiration) ( Kim et al, 2020 ), groups (e.g., group performance and innovation) ( Van Knippenberg et al, 2004 ; Guo et al, 2021 ; Hou et al, 2021 ), and organizations (e.g., organizational performance and reputation) ( Dwyer et al, 2003 ). This is because, based on an information processing perspective ( Dahlin et al, 2005 ), people with different backgrounds, demographics, and cognitions can provide a larger resource pool in the workplace.…”

How do knowledge diversity and ego-network structures affect firms' sustainable innovation: evidence from alliance innovation networks of China's new energy industries

“…Wang et al (2014) and Zhao et al (2021) thought that KD refers to the number of knowledge elements an organization owns. In addition, scholars have conducted some basic research on KD from the individual (Berliant and Fujita, 2011), team (Hou et al , 2021) or organizational level (Chen and Liang, 2016). However, previous studies about KD mainly focused on its consequence, such as the impact of KD on performance (Nagano, 2020), innovation performance (Li et al , 2020), team creativity (Yao, Liu and He, 2022) and novel solution-ideas (Malhotra and Majchrzak, 2019).…”