Strategies to promote cross-functional team creativity in SMEs: the cooperative effect of organizational fit and cognitive interaction

Abstract

Given the overwhelming increase in the background of knowledge-based economy and cross-functional team, one of the critical challenges that stimulation of the team creativity face when trying to integrate members across different functions is the need to concern individual-team suitability and overcome differentiated knowledge representation. However, availability of person-organization fit is merely applied to organization s’ development at individual level. And the issue of how to enhance team creativity in the process of interactive coordination and knowledge sharing is largely understudied. Our study attempts to investigate the TMS links between the member-team fit and cross-functional team creativity, we introduce one of the individual self-concept as moderator variable in the above relationships. We have administered a survey design with 82 teams from 35 Sic-tech enterprises and employed the cross-level mediating model for data analysis. Results show that TMS served as a positive mediator between the cross-level relationships and a feasible path of moderated mediation has been explored. These findings indicates that in the formation of a cross-functional team creativity at the cross-level are important mechanisms to understand how the remarkable effects from the individual level are transmitted to the team level.