How and when team regulatory focus influences team innovation and member creativity
| Date | 05 February 2018 |
| Pages | 95-117 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-09-2016-0236 |
| Published date | 05 February 2018 |
| Author | Ci-Rong Li,Chun-Xuan Li,Chen-Ju Lin |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Global HRM |
How and when team regulatory
focus influences team innovation
and member creativity
Ci-Rong Li and Chun-Xuan Li
School of Management, Jilin University, Changchun, China, and
Chen-Ju Lin
Department of Marketing and Distribution Management,
Tzu Chi University of Science and Technology, Hualien, Taiwan
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to test how team regulatory focus may relate to individual creativity
and team innovation; and address the fit/misfit issue of team regulatory focus and team bureaucracy.
Design/methodology/approach –The authors collected data from 377 members and their leaders within
56 R&D teams in two Taiwanese companies.
Findings –A team promotion focus was positively related, whereas a team prevention focus was negatively
related, to both team innovation and member creativity through team perspective taking and employee
information elaboration, respectively. Furthermore, team bureaucracy played a moderating role that
suppressed the indirect relationship between team regulatory focus and creativity.
Originality/value –This is one of first studies to explore an underlying mechanism linking team regulatory
focus and both team innovation and member creativity. The authors provide a more complete view of the
creative and innovation implications of team-level self-regulation.
Keywords Bureaucracy, Innovation, Creativity, Quantitative, Team regulatory focus
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Because innovation is crucial for an organization in highly competitive environments,
researchers in organizational behaviorand management have devoted considerableattention
on how to enhance innovation (e.g. Khazanchi and Masterson, 2011; Gong et al., 2012).
Among other perspectives, scholars have adopted regulatory focus theory regarding
promoting innovation in the workplace (e.g. Rietzschel, 2011). Two distinct modes of
regulatory focus have been examined: a promotion focus, in which people are primarily
focused on achievement, growth, and the realization of aspirations; and a prevention focus,
in which people are primarily focused on security, safety, and responsibility (Higgins, 1998;
Shah et al., 1998). Prior studies have shown that individual promotion focus has a positive
relationshipwith individual creativity and innovative performance,but individual prevention
focus has not (Wallace et al., 2016; Lam and Chiu, 2002).
Recent research has showed that collective regulatory focus in a team relates to team
innovation because collective regulatory focu s is a contextual factor that exerts
motivational influence on workplace performance (Rietzschel, 2011; Shin et al., 2016).
Team promotion focus refers to a shared understanding of the extent to which a team
emphasizes attaining positive outcomes (Faddegon et al., 2008), which has been shown to
promote team innovation; whereas, team prevention focus emphasizes avoiding negative
outcomes (Faddegon et al., 2008), which may inhibit team innovation. Despite all of this
Personnel Review
Vol. 47 No. 1, 2018
pp. 95-117
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-09-2016-0236
Received 10 September 2016
Revised 2 January 2017
26 February 2017
Accepted 4 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
The authors are grateful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71602067), the Humanity and
Social Science on Youth Fund of the Ministry of Education (15YJCZH084), and the China Postdoctoral
Science Foundation (2016M601387) for their research support. This paper was partially supported by
Taiwan Ministry of Science and Technology with project Grant No. MOST 104-2410-H-277-001-MY2.
95
Team
innovation
and member
creativity
accumulated knowledge, little research has been done to explore how team/collective
regulatory focus can influence team innovation. Furthermore, when team innovation
requires that members initially choose to engage in creative behaviors (Gong et al., 2013;
Somech and Drach-Zahavy, 2013), it thus begs the question of whether team regulatory
focus also relates to member creativity, and if so, how. However, assuming that team
regulatory focus has the same relationship with individual creativity as team regulatory
focus has with team innovation is problematic, because individuals respond differently to
the same workplace context (Shin et al., 2012). Overall, we aim to develop and test a
creativity and innovation model regarding the team-level and cross-level influence of team
regulatory focus.
To explore how team regulatory focus influences team innovation and member
creativity, we adopt motivated information processing perspective (De Dreu et al., 2011;
Nijstad and De Dreu, 2012). This perspective indicates that an employee’s desire to learn and
explore engages him or her in systematic information processing activities, which have been
shown to enhance workplace innovation and creativity (Grant and Berry, 2011). Given the
notion of team regulatory focus as a team-level motivational state in which members
regulate their efforts for collective goals (Shin et al., 2016), we argue that team regulatory
focus either motivates or inhibits information processing among team members through
influencing members’motivations to learn and explore. Integrating with the motivated
information processing perspective, we propose an indirect relationship that team
regulatory focus has with team innovation through team-level information processing.
We focus on team perspective taking, which entails sharing, discussing, and integrating the
viewpoints of each teammate, and has been shown to enhance team innovation
(Hoever et al., 2012). This is because innovation is a function of generating good ideas and
developing these ideas beyond their initial state (Somech and Drach-Zahavy, 2013), which
requires members not only considering different viewpoints but also integrating them
(Hoever et al., 2012). Of the individual-level information processing activities, this study
focuses on individual information elaboration –the searching for and consideration of
teammates’information and perspectives regarding team tasks, which has been shown to
enhance generating new ideas (Li et al., 2017). As a result, we examine both indirect
relationships, via team perspective taking and employee information elaboration, that team
regulatory focus have with team innovation and member creativity.
The degree of fit/misfit between the characteristics of team structure and regulatory focus
determine the members’impression and team’s ultimate effectiveness (Beersma et al., 2013;
Johnson et al., 2015). Thus, members not only may engage, more or less, in systematic
information processing when they are in distinct regulatory focused states, but may also
perform at different levels, depending on the structural characteristics of teams in which they
work in (Dimotakis et al., 2012). Generally, when team tasks have placed an emphasis on
creativity and innovation, a team should be structured to be less bureaucratic with more
informal and decentralized (Kratzer et al., 2008). As prior research has indicated, team
bureaucracy largely inhibits team members’creative impression (Hirst et al., 2011). We expect
that a natural misfit ( fit) exists between promotion focus (prevention focus) and team
bureaucratic structure. Specifically, team bureaucracy may hinder ( facilitate) the motivational
tendency for systematic information processing associated with team promotion focus
(team prevention focus). As a result, we examine the influences of team bureaucracy on the
relationship that team regulatory focus has with team perspective taking (individual
information elaboration), and subsequently team innovation (member creativity).
Extending previous research, we delineate and test a multi-level model (Figure 1) that
integratesregulatory focusas a collective self-regulatory processin teams ( Johnson et al., 2015)
within a multi-level frameworkof team innovation andmember creativity. We aimto advance
the multi-level theory of regulatory focus with respect to the innovation process. Second,
96
PR
47,1
To continue reading
Request your trial