Team Innovation

Abstract

Team innovation is of growing importance in research in organizational psychology and organizational behavior as well as organizational practice. I review the empirical literature in team innovation to draw integrative conclusions about the state of the science and to provide a research agenda to move the field forward. The review identifies two main perspectives in team innovation research, the knowledge integration perspective and the team climate perspective. Key conclusions focus on the need to integrate these perspectives to develop an integrative contingency model of the factors providing teams with diverse informational resources and the factors influencing the extent to which teams integrate these resources in a process of information exchange and integration. As part of these integrative efforts, construct consolidation efforts are important to reverse the tendency for proliferation of substantially overlapping moderators and mediators proposed. The review also identifies the contingencies of the relationship between idea development and idea implementation as the most important understudied issue in team innovation research.

How Does Paradoxical Leadership Affect Employees’ Voice Behaviors in Workplace? A Leader-Member Exchange Perspective

“…Although not all studies on paradoxical leadership support this philosophy, yet in terms of paradoxical thinking, the interactive effects of visionary and empowering leadership engender more positive influence on followers' behavioral and work outcomes [12]. In the context of organizational teams, numerous empirical studies have inferred that innovative performance is not easily achieved by diversified teams [13][14][15] and the underlying reason is that such teams face the paradox of differentiation-integration [16]. The paradoxical leadership traits behaviorally integrate and accept opposite demands in parallel to gain from the intent behind the paradox [17,18].…”

Promoting Innovative Performance in Multidisciplinary Teams: The Roles of Paradoxical Leadership and Team Perspective Taking

“…Nevertheless, several empirical findings suggested expertise diversified teams do not easily promote innovative performance ( Bassett-Jones, 2005 ; Horwitz and Horwitz, 2007 ; Guillaume et al, 2017 ). The major reason is that such teams inevitably encounter a differentiation-integration paradox ( van Knippenberg, 2017 ). Specifically, expertise diversity will increase the opportunity to generate various original ideas to meet the requirement for differentiation ( Andriopoulos and Lewis, 2009 ), while also raising the likelihood that group members will be dissatisfied and fail to embrace others’ opinions ( Milliken and Martins, 1996 ).…”

It All Starts with a Good Idea: A New Coding System for Analyzing Idea Finding Interactions (AIFI)

“…To relate our observations to existing coding systems, we carried out a thorough literature search covering previous literature and empirical studies on team creativity and team innovation [5,27,29,42] as well as on team interaction coding [18,44]. We consolidated both universal group interaction coding systems [2,6,13,34] as well as more setting-specific coding systems for idea generation [11,15,37].…”

“…Since tasks become more interconnected, most of these challenges cannot be solved by a single individual but require that teams, ideally consisting of members with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, come together and pull their efforts to drive organizational innovation [29]. As a result, team creativity and team innovation are on the agenda for most organizations and sparked a growing amount of academic research [42]. These efforts cumulated in a growing consensus that we need to gain a better understanding of the creative processes unfolding in teams [8].…”