互动公平差异、团队工作繁荣与团队创造力——基于团队自主权的调节作用

Interactional Justice Differentiation, Team Thriving at Work and Team Creativity: The Moderating Effect of Team Autonomy

领导在团队工作中以“厚此薄彼”的方式对待下属,深刻影响团队创造力水平。结合社会信息加工理论,以团队工作繁荣为中介变量,以团队自主权为调节变量,构建互动公平差异对团队创造力的影响机理模型。采取多来源和时滞式的研究设计,运用SPSS等统计分析软件,基于80个团队466名成员调研数据,对研究假设进行实证检验。结果表明:互动公平差异消极影响团队创造力;团队工作繁荣对团队创造力具有积极作用,且其在互动公平差异与团队创造力间发挥中介作用;团队自主权在互动公平差异与团队创造力间发挥显著调节作用,即团队自主权越高,互动公平差异与团队工作繁荣间负向关系越弱;团队自主权调节团队工作繁荣对互动公平差异—团队创造力的中介作用,即当团队自主权水平高时,互动公平差异通过团队工作繁荣影响团队创造力的效果较弱。

With the increasingly fierce market competition and more refined division of labor within enterprises,more and more enterprises complete some innovation tasks in teamwork,and thus it is particularly critical to explore the influencing factors of team creativity.The promotion of team creativity is inseparable from the interaction between leaders and members.Furthermore,leaders often treat subordinates in a way of“favoring one over the other”in teams,which has a profound impact on team creativity.That is,some members are treated with a high level of interactional justice,while the level of interactional justice with other members is low,thus forming interactional justice differentiation.Some scholars had made a call for further research on the influence of interactional justice differentiation on team output.Hence,based upon social information processing theory,this study aims to explore how and when interactional justice differentiation affects team creativity by building up a moderated mediation theoretical model.Besides,the mediating effect of team thriving at work and the moderating role of team autonomy were examined.This study employs survey data from 80 groups including 466 members in over ten high-technology companies from China with a multiple-source,time-lagged research design,and then it uses the statistical analysis methods(i.e.,SPSS)and analyzes the data to test the proposed hypotheses.The results are as follows.First of all,interactional justice differentiation is negatively related to team creativity.Second,team thriving at work affects team creativity positively,and the association between interactional justice differentiation and team creativity is mediated by it.Third,team autonomy moderates the relationship between interactional justice differentiation and team thriving at work,and thus interactional justice differentiation has a weaker negative impact on team thriving at work under high team autonomy.Last,team autonomy moderates the mediated relationship between interactional justice differentiation and team creativity(via team thriving at work),such that the mediated relationship is weaker under high team autonomy.This paper examines the influence of interactional justice differentiation on team outputs by making a linkage between interactional justice differentiation and team creativity.This attempt responds to the call to further explore the effectiveness of interactional justice differentiation.This study also enriches the current research on the mediating mechanism of the effect of interactional justice differentiation on team creativity by exploring the mediating effect of team thriving at work.The findings offer a new perspective to understand the relationship between interactional justice differentiation and team creativity.Meanwhile it also inspires scholars to explore the influence mechanism of interactional justice differentiation on team creativity from other perspectives in future research.Moreover,this study verifies the moderating role of team autonomy in the relationship between interactional justice differentiation and team creativity.This finding expands the applicable scope of team autonomy.Future research is warranted to further explore the effectiveness of interactional justice differentiation.The research results of this study have some importance for team creativity in practice.First,for team leaders,they should pay attention to the profound influence of justice on team creativity in the process of interaction with their members.For example,in the allocation of limited tangible or intangible resources,some regulations should be formulated fairly so that subordinates can regard leaders as models to learn from and strive to overcome the difficulties encountered in the process of innovation.Second,to further improve team creativity,one of the effective methods for team leaders is to promote team thriving at work.Specifically,team leaders can organize seminars to brainstorm solutions to problems,so they can get much more help from members when encountering difficulties in the innovative process.Moreover,team leaders can also offer members learning opportunities.They can organize members to learn professional skills so that team members can access much more new knowledge and information,and constantly update the team knowledge base,which will further improve team creativity.Third,when team autonomy is high,team members can control the whole work progress according to their own specific situation,so that they can not only meet their own needs,but also achieve the common goals of teams,and hold high satisfaction with their team leaders.