Effects of Different Trust on Team Creativity: Taking Knowledge Sharing as a Mediator

In the highly dynamic and competitive environment, firms increasingly rely on teams and their members’ creativity to survive and succeed. Trust has been found to be the critical antecedent of team creativity, whereas what forms of trust and to what extent the trust can affect team creativity are still unexplored comprehensively. In this respect, the article synthesizes three different types of trust and explores their effect mechanisms on team creativity as well as the role of knowledge sharing in mediating the relationship between trust and team creativity. A survey is conducted to a sample of 61 project teams comprising 409 members from small and medium-sized Chinese firms in Dalian. The findings suggest that there exist different ways for trust to affect team creativity through knowledge sharing, of which calculative trust and institutional trust improve the team creativity by sharing the explicit knowledge, and relational trust ad hoc cognitive trust positively contributes to team creativity through sharing the tacit knowledge.