The influence of R&D team diversity on creativity

Abstract

Recent research has highlighted the role of team diversity on individual and team creativity due to the growing needs of technology convergence as well as the growing proportion of women and ethnic minorities in the labor market and the increasing mobility of workforces across borders. However, little multi-level research on team diversity and individual creativity has been conducted and the relationship between team diversity and team creativity have shown inconsistent. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether and how R&D team diversity affects creativity at individual and team-level by incorporating coworker support and conflicts as well as to examine the situational conditions that can promote individual and team-level creativity by using transformational leadership. I conducted two complementary studies based upon the multi-level and team-based surveys with data collected from 185 researchers in 24 R&D teams. In the first study, using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM), I explore how R&D team diversity (i.e., information and social category diversity) relates to researchers’ creative process engagement by incorporating perceived coworker support as a team-level mediator to explain the relationship between team diversity and creative behaviors. As a contextual factor, I incorporated a team leader characteristic (i.e., transformational leadership) as a facilitator of cooperative behaviors among team members in the relationship between team diversity and coworker support. In the second study, I explore how and when team diversity is related to team creativity by incorporating conflict between team diversity and team creativity. I also examined the moderating role of transformational leadership, as a coordinator of conflicts between team members, in the relationship between team diversity and conflicts. As a result of the relationship between team diversity and individual creativity, I confirmed that informational diversity of an R&D team was negatively related to researchers’ creative process engagement via coworker support, which was inconsistent with previous findings on team-level studies in which functional and educational diversity had a positive effect on team creativity. More specifically, informational diversity was found to be negatively associated with coworker support while the coworker support was positively related with members’ creative process engagement. Meanwhile, transformational leadership mitigated the negative relationship, thereby encouraging researchers in an R&D team with a high level of informational diversity to cooperate with each other. Second, as a result of the relationship between team diversity and team creativity, I confirmed that informational diversity had a positive effect on team creativity, but conflict did not have a significant mediating effect between team diversity and creativity. I also found that transformational leadership demonstrated a negative moderating effect between informational diversity and task conflict in such a way that when transformational leadership was high, teams with higher informational diversity showed lower task conflicts among team members. I discuss the paradox of R&D team diversity and the role of leadership in R&D organizations.