Team Perspective Taking and Collective Thriving in College Students’ Innovation Teams

Abstract

Team perspective taking is a process of team member empathy, motivation for other people’s ideas and feelings, and the ability to understand objectively. It can have positive impacts on teams, but the question of whether team perspective taking positively affects the sense of collective thriving exhibited by the team has not been answered, and the intrinsic mechanism underlying this influence has not been revealed. To explore the impact of team perspective taking on the collective thriving of college student innovation teams, this study constructs a chain mediation model based on theories such as the socially embedded model of thriving. A questionnaire survey was conducted to investigate 225 college student innovation teams. The results show that (1) team perspective taking, team trust, and team reflexivity are positively correlated with collective thriving. (2) Team trust and team reflexivity play separate mediating roles in the influence of team perspective taking on collective thriving. Team trust also plays a chain mediating role, and its mediating path is team perspective taking → team trust → team reflexivity → collective thriving. Team perspective taking not only has a direct effect on the collective thriving of college students’ innovation teams but also has an indirect effect through the chain mediating path of team trust and team reflexivity. This study not only further enriches the antecedent literature on collective thriving but also verifies the promoting effect of various resource factors on collective thriving at the team level and provides a theoretical reference for the activation of collective thriving.