Investigating the curvilinear relationship between temporal leadership and team creativity: The moderation of knowledge complexity and the mediation of team creative process engagement

Summary Modern organizations increasingly rely on teams to provide creative solutions in a timely manner. Temporal leadership has thus gained substantial interest, based on the assumption that it is conducive to team effectiveness. However, we advance a different view of temporal leadership's i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of organizational behavior 2023-05, Vol.44 (4), p.717-738
Main Authors: Duan, Chenggang, Zhang, Melody Jun, Liu, Xinmei, Ling, Chu‐Ding, Xie, Xiao‐Yun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Complexity
Creative process
Creativity
knowledge complexity
Leadership
Moderation
Multisource
Organizational behavior
Organizational change
paradox lens
R&D
Research & development
team creativity
Teams
temporal leadership
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Summary:Summary Modern organizations increasingly rely on teams to provide creative solutions in a timely manner. Temporal leadership has thus gained substantial interest, based on the assumption that it is conducive to team effectiveness. However, we advance a different view of temporal leadership's influence on team creativity. Building on temporal leadership literature and the paradox model of creativity, we propose that temporal leadership has a curvilinear (i.e., inverted U‐shaped) relationship with team creativity. Moreover, team knowledge complexity moderates this relationship, while team creative process engagement conditionally mediates it. We conducted two field studies to test our hypotheses. In Study 1, our analyses of multisource data from 68 research and development teams found that temporal leadership has an inverted U‐shaped relationship with team creativity, especially for teams with high knowledge complexity. In Study 2, analyses of multiwave, multisource data from 100 work teams further revealed that team creative process engagement conditionally mediates the curvilinear relationship. Specifically, temporal leadership has a stronger indirect curvilinear relationship with team creativity through team creative process engagement in teams with high (vs. low) levels of knowledge complexity. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.
ISSN:0894-3796
1099-1379
DOI:10.1002/job.2698