Fostering Team Innovation: Why Is It Important to Combine Opposing Action Strategies?

We develop a framework that provides a general theoretical rationale for the claim made by several authors that combining opposing action strategies fosters team innovation. We distinguish between open and closed strategies and posit that these are opposing but complementary in that each fosters one...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Organization science (Providence, R.I.) R.I.), 2010-05, Vol.21 (3), p.593-608
Main Authors: Gebert, Diether, Boerner, Sabine, Kearney, Eric
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action theory
Analysis
Business creativity
Business innovation
Corporate culture
Cultural anthropology
Disruptive innovation
Dissent
Epistemology
equilibrium of forces
Freedoms
Impact analysis
Innovation
Innovations
Knowledge
Knowledge management
Leadership
Mathematical knowledge
Methods
opposing action strategies
Organizational behavior
Organizational behaviour
paradox
Paradoxes
Process management
Product development
Strategic management
Studies
team innovation
Teams
Teamwork
Technological innovation
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We develop a framework that provides a general theoretical rationale for the claim made by several authors that combining opposing action strategies fosters team innovation. We distinguish between open and closed strategies and posit that these are opposing but complementary in that each fosters one of two processes necessary for team innovation: open action strategies (e.g., delegative leadership) promote knowledge generation, and closed action strategies (e.g., directive leadership) enhance knowledge integration. We argue that each pole of a pair of opposing action strategies both energizes and detracts from elements of innovation. Thus, it could be expected that combining opposing action strategies leads to an impasse, as the negative effects of each strategy might offset the positive effects of the opposite strategy. There is currently no viable explanation in the literature for why this mutual neutralization may not occur. We aim to fill this gap by explicating why and how opposing action strategies, when implemented simultaneously, do not countervail each other's positive effects, but rather yield positive synergies that fuel team innovation.
ISSN:1047-7039
1526-5455
DOI:10.1287/orsc.1090.0485