团队建言结构:概念、前因及其对团队创新的影响

Team Voice Structure: The Concept, Antedents and Its Implication for Team Innovation

面对全球化的竞争压力和持续动荡的外部环境,企业应对的一个关键措施在于改革组织架构,通过组建工作团队,以汇聚员工智慧对市场变化做出有针对性的快速反应。组建团队的目的在于激发每个成员的参与,团队创新需要每位成员敞开心扉,勇于讲出自己的观点和看法。但这一要求在现实中却远非如此,大多数的员工在工作中倾向于保持沉默而不是把自己的观点讲出来。员工保持沉默不仅仅是因为他们害怕触犯领导,同时他们也在通过沉默维护同事关系,避免伤害同事。针对这种困境,本研究提出了团队建言结构这一概念,以分析团队成员之间的建言互动为出发点,探讨团队成员间的建言互动对团队创新的影响。本研究主要包括以下内容:(1)结合社会网络的分析方法,描述团队成员之间建言互动模式,完善团队建言结构的概念基础与理论内涵;(2)在概念发展的基础上,分析影响团队成员之间形成利于创新的建言结构的关键因素;(3)结合概念分析,进一步探讨团队建言结构如何通过促进了团队内部的学习行为和知识运用,进而提升团队创新水平。我们希望在构建理论贡献的同时,探讨企业如何进行有效的团队建言管理,从而打破团队内的沉默,提升团队创新水平。

Given the rapid changes in business environments, team is widely used to make changes. By organizing people together for a common task, firms can effectively integrate the experties of their intellectual captial. Team innovation needs in-depth interaction among members to debate about different views. The richness of the interaction among team members depends largely on their openness to information exchange. However, research has shown that employees are often reluctant to speak up when they have potentially important information to share （Morrison, 2014）. People often remain silence becaue they want to maintain group harmony and avoid interpersonal risks. Therefore, our research question is： How does a firm effectively motivate and manage members＇ voice to each other, so to facilitate team innovation？ In this paper, we adopt a structural approach to address the above question. Our purpose is to examine team innovation by examining the voice structure within teams. We try to integrate the literature on employee voice and team innovation from a structural perspective. We explore the relationship between team voice structure and team innovation in three steps： First, we assume that different voice structures exist among teams. Some teams tend to have voice structures which are more favorable for team innovation than others. Second, we propose to examine the antecedences of team voice structure. Three antecedent variables were proposed to capture the leadership, task, and social attributes of a team. Two contingent variables were identified as well. Finally, we propose a moderated mediation model to theorize the influence of team voice structure on team innovation. At the end, there is a summary of our potential contributions to the literature and practices.