How to enable employee creativity in a team context: A cross-level mediating process of transformational leadership
Introduction
To facilitate employee creativity, one of the prevalent human resource practices is to organize employees into small groups. In groups, members can share their distributed knowledge to enhance their creative capabilities, which in turn help their organization create innovative products and services (Amabile et al., 1996, Wang and Noe, 2010). It is evident that knowledge sharing among employees is critical to organizational creativity and innovation (Carmeli et al., 2013, Gilson et al., 2013, Grant, 1996, Van Wijk et al., 2008, Wang and Noe, 2010). However, placing employees into groups does not always result in effective knowledge sharing and organizational innovation. One key reason may lie in team conflict.
In a team context, conflict is often inevitable, and it can sometimes be a salient antecedent to team effectiveness (De Dreu and Van de Vliert, 1997, Hempel et al., 2009). Though conflict is generally regarded as negative so as to be avoided, a certain type of conflict could be beneficial to organizations. In general, two types of team conflict are widely recognized: task (cognitive) conflict, and relationship (emotional) conflict. Task conflict could contribute to employee knowledge sharing and creativity by triggering an exchange of information and an exploration of diverse and even opposing opinions as well as a re-evaluation of the status quo and a scrutiny of the task at hand (De Dreu & West, 2001). Unlike task conflict, relationship conflict often causes negative psychological reactions, including strain, frustration, anger, and fear, which often hurt employee creativity (De Dreu, 2006). Meanwhile, the two types of conflict often coexist in the same team because task conflict often triggers relationship conflict when people adhere to opposite opinions and perspectives, thus difficult to tease apart the distinctive effects of the two types of conflict on information sharing and performance (Bai et al., in press, Simons and Peterson, 2000). Hence, understanding and then managing the processes and results of different types of team conflict in team context is worthy serious examination.
Bearing the above points in mind, this paper will focus on the specific role of transformational leadership to explain the complex links between team conflict, knowledge-sharing, and creativity process. Transformational leadership has been generally understood as a contextual element influencing and interacting with team dynamics at multiple levels of analysis. Previous studies have devoted considerable attention to the multi-level relationships between transformational leadership and employee outcomes, e.g., job performance, job satisfaction, and organizational citizenship behavior (e.g., López-Domínguez et al., 2013, Tse and Chiu, 2014, Wang and Howell, 2010, Zhu et al., 2013). There is also a growing interest in the link between transformational leadership and employee creativity. Employee creativity can be defined as “the production of novel and useful ideas concerning products, services, processes and procedures by a team of employees working together” (Shin & Zhou, 2007, p. 1715). Despite the growing interest, the primary attention has been on the direct main or moderating effect of transformational leadership on employee creativity (e.g., Herrmann and Felfe, 2013, Herrmann and Felfe, 2014, Hirst et al., 2009, Pieterse et al., 2010, Wang and Rode, 2010) or the indirect effect via individual-level psychological mechanisms, such as creative self-efficacy (Gong, Huang, & Farh, 2009), follower dependency (Eisenbeiss & Boerner, 2013), individual differentiation (Tse & Chiu, 2014), intrinsic motivation and psychological empowerment (Chen et al., 2009, Gumusluoglu and Ilsev, 2009, Jung et al., 2003; see Rosing, Frese, & Bausch, 2011 for the most recent review). In contrast, the team-level mechanisms explaining “how employees working together to create” are understudied (see Eisenbeiss et al., 2008 as an exception for innovation climate as a mediating process). As defined, employee creativity is not only a function of individual talents or intrinsic motivations, but also a result of how team members interact with each other in a dynamic process (Gisber-López, Verdú-Jover, & Gómez-Bras, 2013). Echoing the call from Dionne, Yammarino, Atwater, and Spangler (2004) that “expanding our understanding of specifically how transformational leadership components can be linked to team performance through various teamwork processes” (p. 182), we specifically focus on the effect of transformational leader on the group-level cognitive and emotional processes, which in turn contribute to individual-level creativity.
In light of the important roles of team conflict and knowledge-sharing in team processes in general, and employee creativity in particular, the purpose of this study is to answer the question: how would transformational leadership enhance individual employee creativity via cross-level mechanisms? By addressing this gap in the existing research, our study seeks to make three key contributions. First, we attempt to enrich the research on the complex effects of transformational leadership on team conflict, knowledge sharing, and employee creativity. Creativity research has often been criticized as being confined to individuals as a micro-level analysis, thus limiting our understanding about how creativity develops through higher-level mechanisms (Anderson et al., 2004). Our cross-level model responds to the repeated calls for more research on team dynamics (e.g., Avolio and Yammarino, 2002, Eisenbeiss et al., 2008), with a special attention to the critical role of transformational leadership. Specifically, the study will show that transformational leadership fosters employee creativity by influencing interpersonal motivation and capability in a team context via the intensive interaction between members in a team (Shih, Chiang, & Chen, 2012). Second, to further open the black box of team dynamics, we focus on two core process-related variables, i.e., team conflict and knowledge sharing, as two cross-level mediators, in tandem, between transformational leadership and employee creativity. The proposed three-path cross-level mediating process via team conflict and knowledge sharing can enrich our understanding about the cross-level mechanisms for leadership-creativity link. In other words, we posit that transformational leadership can shape employee creativity indirectly through the mechanisms of team conflict and knowledge sharing.
Third, to embed our study in the macro-level context, we conduct our study in the special context of China not only as an emerging economy but also a unique culture as compared to the West, thus from an “emic” perspective (Tsui, Wang, & Xin, 2006). In general, those cultures that value personalized relationship as the cultural norm (e.g., interpersonal harmony) have been framed as collectivists (Chen and Chen, 2009, Hempel et al., 2009, Triandis et al., 1990). Scholars have evoked this relational orientation as an explanation for the Chinese preference for interpersonal harmony as well as their bias against interpersonal conflict (Tjosvold et al., 2005, Xin and Pearce, 1996). Hence, the need for closure, the emphasis on harmony (Leung, Brew, Zhang, & Zhang, 2011), and the focus on avoiding any open face-to-face confrontation (Bond et al., 1985, Chen and Tjosvold, 2002) may make the typical forms of team conflict among the Chinese different from those in the West. Further, it is worth noting that China has been widely known for its lack of creativity in the past, yet the country has been undertaking major steps to transform its model of economic development from that of “Made in China” to that of “Created in China” (Keane, 2006). It is interesting to learn about how creativity can be fostered in the context of modern China.
Section snippets
The link between transformational leadership and employee creativity
Employee creativity is central to the long-term survival of an organization because employee creativity generates novel and potentially useful ideas to create new, and/or improve existing, products, services, processes, and routines (Shalley, Gilson, & Blum, 2000). Nowadays, rather than confined to R&D staff, employee creativity has been extended to all employees who can directly or indirectly contribute with their novel ideas, so creative ideas may be generated by every employee in any
Sample and data
We collected data from 196 part-time EMBA students enrolled in a business school in China as well as their direct subordinates. Each team consisted of one EMBA student and six of his/her subordinates. These teams were from different companies. The survey for supervisors asked the EMBA students to evaluate the creativity of their subordinates. The survey for subordinates asked them to report the supervisor's transformational leadership, team task and relationship conflict, and knowledge sharing
Theoretical implications
This study bears several theoretical implications. The first and biggest theoretical contribution is the proposed new process model where transformational leadership enhances employee creativity via the team-level mechanisms of team conflict and knowledge sharing. Beyond replicating the previous empirical studies on the positive effect of transformational leadership on employee creativity (e.g., Eisenbeiss et al., 2008, Gumusluoglu and Ilsev, 2009), our study has further opened the black box of
Conclusion
In this study, we unveil a critical part of the complex intra-group process where transformational leadership manages conflict, facilitates knowledge sharing, and finally enhances individual creativity in a team context. Our research fills the existing gaps in literature by unfolding a cross-level process with cross-level mechanisms (e.g., team conflict and knowledge sharing) as a new perspective to understand individual creativity in a team context. Further, this perspective enjoys the unique
Acknowledgments
This study was supported by grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71302073), China Scholarship Council, and the Research Fund for the Outstanding Young Researcher Training Plan of Fujian Province. We also thank the support from the CIBER center of Georgia Institue of Technology.
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