In response to rapid change and fierce competition, creativity is an imperative factor to develop and implement innovation. Hence, most firms have pursued diverse strategies to promote individual and team creativity in the workplace. Shared leadership is a voluntarily, informally emergent structure beyond vertical leadership. A team is composed of individual members, and shared leadership and demographic diversity exist within the team, influencing team creativity. In this respect, we introduced shared leadership as a social network perspective as well as diversity into a team creativity model. In sum, we examined the influence of shared leadership and diversity on knowledge sharing and the subsequent effects on team creativity. Our results showed that role diversity directly influences team creativity, with shared leadership and knowledge sharing positively contributing to team creativity. Thus, knowledge sharing had a partially mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity. Apart from our hypotheses, the present results implied that if gender diversity (as a differentiated factor) is not a minority status, knowledge sharing may have a fully mediating effect between gender diversity and team creativity.
In order to acquire an organizational competitive advantage and respond to rapidly changing environments, the development and implementation of creativity and innovation is essential to today’s turbulent business environment (Lapierre & Giroux, 2003). Many organizations have selected team-based work systems to increase their responsiveness and ability to foster innovation. Such organizations need to be concerned not only with enhancing creativity and innovation among individual employees, but also with developing creative, innovative teams. Relatively fewer studies have been conducted on “team creativity” as compared with individual creativity. In this study, we explore the effects of shared leadership, demographic diversity, and knowledge sharing on team creativity.
Generally, leadership represents itself as a single designated individual. Some scholars (Pearce and Conger, 2003 and Pearce and Sims, 2002) have argued that leadership includes shared roles and activities among members of a team. As a team property, we seek to accentuate shared leadership, which is not imposed on a single designated leader, but is distributed among team members (Carson et al., 2007 and Pearce and Conger, 2003). A single leader may not successfully carry out all necessary leadership functions because the environment has inherent complexity and ambiguity (Day, Gronn, & Salas, 2004). Shared leadership represents mutual influences among team members, which can overcome the limitation of a leadership style by a single leader. Therefore, as a type of horizontal, internal team leadership, shared leadership can contribute to team creativity. In this respect, we choose shared leadership as an antecedent, and examine the relationship between shared leadership and team creativity with a social network perspective by using social network density.
In modern organizations, many workers of different backgrounds work together, and diversity is a domain that researchers and practitioners cannot disregard. Women and minorities have become more significant in the workforce (Loden and Rosener, 1991 and Offerman and Gowing, 1990), and there is an enhanced need for employees of different occupational backgrounds to work together (Dean & Snell, 1991). Due to the importance of team-based approaches in organizations, our study focuses on heterogeneity at the group level. Diversity (interchangeable with heterogeneity) is particularly important at the group level, where individuals interact more regularly than at the organizational level (Jackson et al., 1991 and Parker, 1994). In this sense, we emphasize demographic attributes (e.g., age, race, gender, education, functional background, and tenure) within teams, investigating the implications of demographic diversity for team creativity.
Knowledge-based systems force the members of an organization to extend their work scopes and establish autonomy (DeNisi, Hitt, & Jackson, 2003). Therefore, knowledge sharing may act as a mediator within our team creativity model. Additionally, we assume that there are moderating effects of task complexity (high-level task variety and low-level task analyzability) between shared leadership and knowledge sharing. Task complexity is significantly related to knowledge sharing (Phang & Foong, 2005). In an e-learning environment, task complexity might also directly (positively or negatively) influence knowledge sharing. However, when team members complexly perceive tasks, an interactive mechanism through shared leadership might be positively related to knowledge sharing. Namely, at the high level of perceived task complexity, team members may mutually depend on the leadership of other members.
We arranged 40 teams consisting of four to eight members in an e-learning environment, identifying and examining the constructs that are most closely related to team creativity. We first review the selected constructs and their relationships based on previous studies. Second, we undertake assessments of the discriminant and convergent validities of these relationships. Lastly, we examine our hypotheses using hierarchical regression analysis.
