The Effect of Team’s Cognitive Diversity on Team Creative Performance

Abstract

Abstract: Previous researches on the relationship between team’s cognitive diversity and creative performance are mainly based on the perspectives of resource information and identification. In order to resolve the theoretical gaps and inconsistent findings of these two perspectives, we further explore the mediating effect of team absorptive capacity and the moderating effect of benevolent leadership on the relationship between team’s cognitive diversity and creative performance on the basis of absorptive capacity theory. Through a multilevel analysis on the paried data of 84 team leaders and 350 team members, we find that the improvement of a team’s cognitive diversity can enhance its absorptive capacity, and further improve its creative performance. In addition, when the level of benevolent leadership is higher, team’s cognitive diversity has a stronger effect in promoting team’s absorptive capacity, while the positive effect of team’s absorptive capacity on team’s innovation performance will be weakened. With these findings, we not only enrich and expand the research on the relationship between team diversity and creative performance from a new theoretical perspective to form a theoretical consensus, but also provide managers with alternative leadership strategies to further promote creative work in diversified teams.

Key words: team’s cognitive diversity, absorptive capacity, creative performance, benevolent leadership

Tang Minhui, Zheng Shi, Yan Ming, Dong Feng. The Effect of Team’s Cognitive Diversity on Team Creative Performance[J]. Management Review, 2023, 35(3): 71-82.

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