团队多样性与组织支持对团队创造力的影响

The effects of group diversity and organizational support on group creativity

采用实验法在专业异质性与群体断层两个水平上操纵团队多样性,通过两个实验考察团队多样性与组织支持的交互作用对团队创造力的影响。研究结果表明:(1)在独创性维度上,专业异质团队在工具支持条件下的独创性显著高于专业同质团队,情感和物质支持条件下二者差异不显著。当团队出现群体断层时,情感支持与工具支持具有同样的促进作用,即在这两种组织支持下,强断层团队的独创性显著高于弱断层团队;物质支持条件下二者差异不显著。(2)在适宜性维度上,组织支持的主效应显著,两个实验一致地发现物质支持条件下的适宜性显著高于情感支持和工具支持。本研究从团队多样性与组织支持交互作用的角度考察不同复杂程度、不同组织目标的多样性团队所需要的组织支持条件,对促进团队创造力具有一定的理论与实践价值。

The research on group creativity has recently surged for its importance in the development of business and society. Group creativity is recognized widely as the ability to produce original and adaptive products, and several influential factors have been examined in the previous research. Among these influential factors, diversity is a powerful predictor. Information and Decision-making Theories suggest that diversity leads to improved cognitive processing and better use of information; while Social-Categorization Theory indicates that diversity is likely to negatively affect team processes and group creativity. Postulations proposed by each theory have their own supporting experimental evidence. Recently, researchers come to realize that whether the diversity promotes the group creativity depends on the organization context, especially the organizational support, which is always regarded as a positive factor for group creativity. Therefore, the present study was designed to test the interactive effect of diversity and organizational support on group creativity. To our best knowledge, there has been no study focused on this problem. Two experiments were carried out to investigate the interactive effects. Experiment 1 was a mixed design with the organizational support （instrumental/emotional/ material support） as a within-subject factor, and specialty diversity （specialty heterogeneous/homogeneous team） as the between-subject factor. Two hundred and sixteen undergraduate students forming fifty-four groups participated in the experiment. Experiment 2 was a between-subject design, and diversity was focused on further diverse groups--team with strong or weak faultline. Three hundred and twelve undergraduate students （four students formed one group） participated in experiment 2. The same experimental procedure was applied in the two experiments using product design task, and CAT technique was used to appraise the group creativity. Results showed that： （1） the interaction between diversity and organizational support was significant for originality of group creativity. Specifically, the originality in specialty heterogeneous teams was higher than that in specialty homogeneous teams under the condition of instrumental support, and the originality in the teams with strong faultlines was higher than that in the teams with weak faultlines under the condition of emotional support and instrumental support. （2） the appropriateness of group creativity in specialty heterogeneous teams was higher than that in homogeneous teams. The score of appropriateness was significantly higher in the teams under the condition of the material support than that of emotional support and instrumental support. The latter existed in both experiments. These results suggested that diverse teams had the potential to promote group creativity, but the effect was moderated by organizational support and varied on different aspects of group creativity. Specifically, instrumental support mainly promoted the originality of group creativity in the teams with specialty heterogeneity and strong faultlines, while emotional support was conducive to originality in teams with strong faultlines. Moreover, among the three types of organizational support, material support was the best predictor of the appropriateness. These results shed lights on the understanding of the two theories we mentioned in the beginning, and provided practical implications for organizations to promote group creativity.