THE ROLE OF INHIBITING AND FACILITATING FACTORS IN THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN EMPOWERMENT, CREATIVITY, AND
INNOVATION IN TEAMS
Master Thesis, MSc HRM University of Groningen Faculty of Economics and Business
LIMING WANG Student number: 1832557 Damsterdiep 68 9713 EJ Groningen Tel. +31649270413 Dawndawn.w@gmail.com Supervisor Dr. Onne Janssen Second Supervisor Dr. G.S. (Gerben) van der Vegt
Acknowledgements:
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION
Under the trend of heightened levels of competition and an uncertain and complex business environment, organizations increasingly use work teams with adequate autonomy, authority, and responsibility to respond to contemporary challenges with creativity and innovation (Gilson, Mathieu, Shalley & Ruddy, 2005; Somech, 2006). This is because empowered teams are believed to be more flexible and responsive to the ever-changing market and better able to initiate and implement novel and useful products, ideas or procedures (Amabile, 1988; Oldham & Cummings, 1996). Team empowerment is defined as “increased task motivation due to team members’ collective, positive assessments of their organizational tasks” (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999), which has been studied intensively by researchers in recent years (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999, 2000; Mathieu, Gilson & Ruddy, 2006), and has been linked to creativity and innovation to some extent.
Although empowered teams are widely claimed to be the best vehicle for the initiation and implementation of novel ideas, some scholars and researchers emphasized the potential of teams to frustrate creativity and innovation (Amabile, 1998; Paulus, 2000; Thompson, 2003; Tjosvold, Tang & West, 2004; West, 2002). Therefore, the first goal of this paper is to identify some specific inhibitors that may mitigate the positive influence of team empowerment on the generation and implementation of novel ideas – creativity and innovation. Since cognitive processes play a crucial role in generating creative ideas, while innovation is primarily an inter-individual social process (Rank, Pace & Frese, 2004), the inhibitors of creativity such as idea production blocking are cognitive in nature, while inhibitors such as social loafing of innovation mainly refer to social interference.
moderating effects on the relationships between team empowerment, team creativity and team innovation.
This paper is organized as follows. First of all, the basic concept of team empowerment is defined. As empowerment is not inherently formed in a team, there must be some prerequisites that build an appropriate environment for its development. Therefore, after defining team empowerment, the paper discusses three key antecedents, namely, team-based HR practices, organizational support, and production/service responsibilities (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999, 2000; Mathieu et al., 2006). Then, the two core relationships between team empowerment and creativity and between creativity and innovation are discussed. After that, the inhibitors of either relationship are revealed, which is followed by discussing facilitators, again differentiating between the two relationships. Finally, a discussion section is laid out, where conclusions from this paper are incorporated, limitations to the model outlined, and recommendations for future research made.
TEAM EMPOWERMENT AND SOME KEY ANTECEDENTS Team Empowerment
In the last decade, research of empowerment has been extending from individual level to team analysis (Hyatt & Ruddy, 1997; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999, 2000; Kirkman, Rosen, Tesluk & Gibson, 2004; Mathieu et al., 2006). This is because teams, as mentioned earlier, are playing a gradually more important role in the competitions among organizations. Team empowerment in this paper is defined as “increased task motivation due to team members’ collective, positive assessments of their organizational tasks” (Kirkman & Rosen, 2000). To be specific, teams can experience empowerment on four dimensions: potency, meaningfulness, autonomy, and impact (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999).
Potency is the joint belief of a team that it can be effective, which parallels the empowerment construct of self-efficacy or competence at the individual level (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990; Conger & Kanungo, 1988; Spreitzer, 1996). Members in potent teams display a confident and can-do attitude (Kirkman & Rosen, 2000). In Kirkman and Rosen’s (1999) research, high-potency teams knew clearly about their capabilities as a team, apart from their individual abilities, and often kept “we”- and “us”- talking instead of “I” or “they”, whereas in low-potency teams the situation was quite the opposite.
With meaningfulness, team members regard their goals as important, worthwhile and valuable (Hackman & Oldham, 1980). Moreover, they have a sense of purpose and show more intrinsic caring about their tasks, thus sharing joint commitment to their tasks (Kirkman & Rosen, 2000)
Autonomy, corresponding to the individual construct of choice (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990; Spreitzer, 1996), refers to the freedom, independence and discretion in work available to team members. Teams with high levels of autonomy have the freedom to allocate resources, to seize opportunities, and to make rapid decisions to quickly respond to the emergent changes around them.
dispensable. Feedback from customers may contribute to the sense of impact (Kirkman & Rosen, 2000) because people want their efforts to be “seen”.
Unlike individual empowerment, which consists of a set of individual cognitions (Spreitzer, 1995a), empowerment at the team level emerges from collective cognition – it is socially constructed – and stands for members’ assessments of their tasks and the conditions under which they work (Kirkman et al., 2004). Whether team members can feel empowered or not depends on the degree to which team leaders allow them to make decision and whether the team has access to important resources (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Therefore, I define three important antecedents which are all relevant to these two criteria to foster empowerment in a team, namely, team-based human resource practices, organizational support, and production/service responsibilities.
Team-Based Human Resource (HR) Practices
In essence, including HR practices such as recruitment and selection, training and performance feedback in the team can substantially contribute to the formation of team empowerment.
Proposition 1. Team-based human resources practices are positively related to team empowerment.
Organizational Support
A supportive organizational context is of great importance to the development of team empowerment (Hackman & Oldham, 1976; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Organizational support is understood as sources of support that are external to the team yet come from within the larger system – organization (Mathieu et al., 2006). For instance, team empowerment can benefit from a climate in which teams can openly communicate and cooperate with each other and freely share and exchange information (Mathieu et al. 2006). This type of climate creates an atmosphere of psychological safety among team members, where they are not afraid of making mistakes but enjoy the experience of taking risk which is a necessary quality of empowered people (Quinn & Spreitzer, 1997). Also, effective communication helps eliminate and prevent unhealthy conflict between teams, and keep team members concentrate on bigger issues (Kirkman & Rosen, 2000). Additionally, organizations may also foster team member empowerment by providing essential resources, sharing important strategic information, and developing relevant team norms or policies. All of these aspects make team members feel a sense of control over their jobs (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999), which can lead to more competency and impact (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990), and further to team empowerment.
Proposition 2. Team members’ perceptions of organizational support are positively related to team empowerment.
Production/service responsibilities
participate more in not only operational but strategic activities of the organization as well. Actually, people can get such responsibilities through appropriate structural design of work. Scholars (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999; Mathieu et al., 2006) argue that when the structural design of work shifts control and responsibility from external management to teams, members should experience greater team empowerment.
Hackman and Oldham (1976) reasoned that more participation in (strategic) goal setting could bring about higher intrinsic motivation and a stronger sense of empowerment. This may also help people better understand their tasks, which further enhances meaningfulness (Thomas & Velthouse, 1990). Meanwhile, increased decision-making in scheduling production makes team members a meaningful part of the production process and creates more autonomy (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999). Similarly, more control over the product or service quality also contributes to the sense of autonomy (Kirkman & Rosen, 1999).
Proposition 3. Production/service responsibilities are positively related to team empowerment.
Figure 2. Team empowerment and its antecedents
and useful ideas (West, 2002; Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Zhou, 2003; Amabile et al., 1996), while innovation typically refers to the practical introduction of these ideas (Amabile et al., 1996). Consequently, creativity is the seed or foundation of all innovation (Janssen, van de Vliert & West, 2004; Amabile et al., 1996), which shows that creativity can never be removed from practice, but novel ideas are only creative when they are implementable.
Moreover, it is believed that team creativity in essence relies on intra-individual cognitive processes.That is, ideas always start in individual minds, even if these ideas are shared, transformed, and developed within a team (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2000). Team creativity is understood here as a combination of quality and quantity of new and useful ideas that are developed in a team. Therefore, it is uncontroversial that team creativity is to some extent determined by individual creativity (Pirola-Merlo & Mann, 2004), but is more than an aggregate of creativity across team members (Taggar, 2002). This is because individual creativity can provide the raw material of novel and useful ideas, but team member interactions and team processes play a crucial role in determining how the raw material can be developed into team-level creativity (Pirola-Merlo & Mann, 2004; Taggar, 2002). Consequently, individual creativity is believed to be a necessary but insufficient condition of team creativity.
Considering the distinct nature of team creativity and team innovation, team empowerment can greatly contribute to the generation of novel ideas through its four dimensions, while the creativity process in turn can promote the further development and implementation of new and useful ideas. The relationship between team empowerment, team creativity and innovation will be further delineated in the following parts.
Figure 3. Relationships between team empowerment, team creativity and team innovation The relationship between team empowerment and team creativity
mundane aspects in that they are propelled by the real interest in and commitment to the job itself. In this case, they conclude that such teams can treat ordinary tasks in an extra-ordinary way – creativity, both individually and collectively. Finally, impact is another aspect of team empowerment. When team members believe they can influence the organizational outcomes, they may feel less constrained by established standards, procedures and rules in the team (Amabile, 1988; Spreitzer, 1995b), enabling them to think out of the box by taking creative approaches in work processes.
Therefore, team empowerment can encourage the creativity of each team member and further fostering team creativity because, as indicated earlier, even though individual creativity cannot completely determine the team-level creativity, it provides the exact raw material to team creativity.
Proposition 4. Team empowerment is positively related to the generation of creative ideas within a team.
The relationship between team creativity and innovation
Figure 4. Four-Stage Creativity and Innovation Process (from the prototype of Basadur & Gelade, 2006)
The other two stages are optimizing and implementing which are two branches of innovation. In optimizing process, individuals are likely to make logical evaluations and to select the optimal alternative or solution to a problem, and meanwhile planning the implementation process. When it comes to the implementing process, people prefer to try things out and get things done rather than testing them mentally. They attempt to translate plans and ideas into action by using as many approaches as necessary. Therefore, in a team context, newly generated and conceptualized ideas (team creativity) are prerequisites for the next stages of evaluation and selection, in order to be brought to completion in the implementation stage (team innovation).
Proposition 5. Team creativity is positively related to team innovation.
INHIBITORS AND FACILITATORS
Even though teams are regarded as a best vehicle for the generation and implementation of novel and useful ideas, there still exist some dark sides of a team that may hinder the processes of creativity and innovation. In this part, these inhibitors will be elaborated. As creativity fundamentally relies on cognitive processes while innovation is more social in nature, we focus on cognitive inhibitors in the empowerment-creativity relationship and on social inhibitors in the creativity-innovation link.
that can strengthen the two relationships and alleviate the negative influence of inhibitors on innovation and creativity as well.
Inhibitors Creativity-relevant inhibitors
To date, a lot of studies on team creativity have been focused on brainstorming groups. Brainstorming aims at increasing the sharing of knowledge and ideas in groups, which is regarded as an effective way to generate ideas (Paulus, 2000; Gallupe, Bastianutti & Cooper, 1991). However, brainstorming still tends to trigger negative aspects due to multiple people trying to integrate their best efforts simultaneously, leading to inefficiencies and process losses (Kurtzberg & Amabile, 2000). As creativity mainly relies on intra-personal cognitive processes, most factors within team settings that restrain the cognitive process of idea generation happen in individual minds. These inhibitors may come up because of the inherent deficiencies of team members themselves, or because of the influence of the colleagues in the same team. Therefore, three cognitive interferences will be discussed in the following part: productivity blocking, cognitive load and fear of negative judgment.
Productivity blocking
Cognitive load
Paulus (2000) also argues that the cognitive demands of attending to the ideas presented by others while still trying hard to generate one’s own ideas may further lower individual productivity. This causes too much cognitive load and distracts the subject that should be focused on. In a more general sense, besides the brainstorming task, team members need cognitive capacity to accomplish their regular and routine tasks. The more they get cognitively involved in carrying out their daily tasks, the less cognitive capacity will be left for team members to think widely or use their knowledge and expertise for generating creative ideas to solve problems and seize opportunities. Even if they get enough intrinsic motivation from team empowerment to work well, too much cognitive load associated with the regular and daily job responsibilities may exhaust their capacity and energy needed to engage in producing creative ideas, and hence hindering the process of creativity.
Conformity
Proposition 6. Team-inherent cognitive interferences such as production blocking, cognitive load, and conformity can inhibit the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Innovation-relevant inhibitors
Innovation requires the active and coordinated use of multiple team members to benefit the team or the organization. Thompson (2003) argues that it is often impossible to achieve innovation through individuals and emphasizes that the further development and implementation rely on inter-individual processes and efforts. This is because team as a whole has access to more necessary resources and team collaboration is more beneficial to turning virtual ideas into practice. However, some team factors can frustrate the required team processes for successful innovation because external environment is so likely to affect individual behaviors. In this part, three social inhibitors in the transformation from creativity into innovation will be elaborated: social loafing, stabilized group norms and change of social roles.
Social loafing
Social loafing happens when team members become less motivated when individual contributions are combined as a group product (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987). When ideas or contributions are evaluated and worked out at the team level, some team members may tend to take a free ride. In this case, the identifiability of individual contributions will be lowered especially when the group is with a big size (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987). This triggers team members’ feeling that their contribution is dispensable (Kerr & Bruun, 1983). As a result, potent team members lose the motivation to make all efforts. However, during the process of transforming ideas (creativity) into practice (innovation), implementers need to try as many as different approaches to get the job done, and also need to search for solutions when ideas do not fit the facts (Basadur & Gelade, 2006). Social loafing greatly reduces the potential capacity of empowered teams to further work out and implement creative ideas successfully.
Teams tend to be a stabilizing force directed at facilitating a team’s continuity and longevity. Group norms and routines cultivate maintenance of the status quo (Klein & Sorra, 1996). Stabilized norms in most cases encourage team members to adhere to the current framework of shared goals, thoughts and routines, thereby triggering their fear of proposing bold changes (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999). However, sometimes these established frameworks fail, due to various reasons, to facilitate team members to do the things that they know would strengthen performance and morale (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999). As discussed before, innovation requires team members to look for different approaches to translate creativity into practice (Basadur & Gelade, 2006). But confronted with numerous norms or rules, individuals may regard “searching for various ways of doing things” as tasks beyond their control and pay more attention to the rules and standards governing the task processes. As a result, they just safely duplicate previous success (Choi, Anderson & Veillette, 2009). Consequently, even though individuals have creative ideas, stabilized group norms can prevent them from keeping exploring different approaches to implement them.
Change of social roles
processes may occur, such as the poor cooperation and animosity among colleagues, resulting in the high possibility of failure of implementing novel ideas.
Proposition 7. Dysfunctional team processes such as social loafing, stabilized group norms, and change of roles inhibit the positive relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Figure 4. Inhibitors of the relationships between team empowerment, team creativity and team innovation.
Facilitators
Team creativity and team innovation vary in their nature and have to be supported by different conditions in order to be achieved successfully. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between the two groups of facilitators that will be discussed in this section: (1) facilitators strengthening the relationship between a team’s empowerment and creativity, and (2) facilitators strengthening the relationship between a team’s creativity and innovation.
empowerment already involves increased task motivation, we choose to elaborate on domain-relevant knowledge, thinking skills and personality traits as member attributes that may facilitate the influence of team empowerment. However, we will elaborate that these member attributes are also relevant for transforming creativity into innovation, albeit that other thinking skills and personality traits are likely to be relevant.
As there are many team characteristics that potentially facilitate creativity and innovation, it is not the purpose of this paper to examine them all, but to select some of them based on the nature of the two relationships between team empowerment and creativity, and between team creativity and innovation. In this paper, I will focus on three team characteristics that can facilitate both relationships. First, the extent to which a team’s climate provides a positive environment that is supportive for the generation and implementation of novel ideas. Second, goal setting which provides teams with a clear guide for creativity and innovation. Third, leadership which is supportive for empowered teams to generate creative ideas and to subsequently implement the ideas generated.
Creativity-relevant facilitators
Member attributes Domain-relevant knowledge
amount about a particular area and has specific skills to solve problems in that area (Taggar, 2002).
Proposition 8. The availability of team members with domain-relevant knowledge strengthens the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity. Creative-thinking skills
Creative-thinking skills refer to “how people approach problems and solutions – their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations”(Amabile, 1998). People with this kind of skills tend to take new perspectives on problems and work on a heuristic attitude (Taggar, 2002). They are always more creative because they feel comfortable disagreeing with others and can combine knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. These are all key predictors of creativity. Empowered individuals in a team feel confident in their capabilities and enjoy autonomy which can promote the generation of creative ideas when they possess and use creative-thinking skills to break perpetual sets, break cognitive sets, and pursue new problem-solving strategies.
Proposition 9. The availability of team members with creative-thinking skills strengthens the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Openness to experience
Proposition 10. The availability of team members with a personality trait of openness to experience strengthens the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Team characteristics Group norms of risk taking
Empowered individuals get enough freedom to make decisions. But if they always adhere to previous ways of doing things or pursue conservative methods to solve problems avoiding making big mistakes, creativity can barely happen. Therefore, group norms of risk-taking and tolerance should be developed and encouraged for the process of idea generation (Paulus, 2000; Quinn & Spreitzer, 1997). Only in this way do individuals dare to try new things, and propose creative solutions to problems (Caldwell & O'Reilly, 2003), because nobody can guarantee the success of a newly born idea. In other words, positive norms for risk-taking provide team members with psychological safety (Caldwell & O'Reilly, 2003), which facilitates the generation of creativity. Psychological safety is defined as “a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking” (Edmondson, 1999). This term is meant to give every team member a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish someone for speaking up (Edmondson, 1999). In this regard, individuals will not be afraid to make bold suggestions, and to some extent gain more autonomy and discretion to initiate new ideas. Proposition 11. Group norms of risk taking strengthen the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Participative/supportive leadership
caring for employees’ feelings, give non-judgmental, informational feedback about their work, and encourage them to speak out their concern.
Another facilitating type of leadership is participative leadership defined as “joint decision making, or at least shared influence in decision making, by a superior and his or her employees” (Somech, 2006). Participative leadership expects and encourages team members to express their ideas and opinions surrounding issues at stake and provides them with channels and opportunities for voice delivery. As such, participative decision making is likely to form a strong creativity-supportive context that will facilitate the expression of team empowerment into the generation of ideas. That is, the more team members perceive that their leaders expect them to participate in decision making by coming up with new opinions and suggestions concerning issues at stake, the more likely it is that team empowerment will increase team creativity.
Proposition 12. A participative/supportive leadership style is beneficial to the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Creativity goal setting
Proposition 13. Creativity goal setting strengthens the positive relationship between team empowerment and team creativity.
Innovation-relevant facilitators
Member attributes Domain-relevant knowledge
As we argued before, domain-relevant knowledge provides a strong theoretical background for a team. This benefits not only the creativity process but innovation as well. Because, firstly, when entering the innovation stage, individuals must know how to ‘make things work’ (Basadur & Gelade, 2006). Domain-relevant knowledge reflects an individual’s depth and breadth of knowledge particularly related to the problems to be solved by a team (Taggar, 2002). As such, team members possessing a lot of domain-relevant knowledge know exactly how to transform creativity into practice. In addition, the result of creativity is a pool of ideas, which needs further evaluation and selection that can be best managed by individuals with knowledge in the specific domains; otherwise, potentially best ideas may run the risk of being neglected or weak ideas selected.
Proposition 14. The availability of team members with domain-relevant knowledge strengthens the positive relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Convergent thinking skills
Convergent thinking is regarded as a single-focus activity (Haner, 2005) or as ‘thinking that proceeds toward a single answer’ (Thompson, 2003). The essence of convergent thinking is to narrow down the alternatives of achieving a goal. The creativity stage brings about a pool of ideas, but after that these ideas should be evaluated and finally adopted. Therefore, there must be certain level of consensus on selecting appropriate ways to implement the creative ideas. Haner (2005) emphasizes that convergent thinking should focus on content. Therefore, convergent thinking style enables a whole team to narrow down choices and reach agreement on content, which is essential to transforming creativity into innovation.
Extrovert personality
Since innovation is an interpersonal process, good innovators should behave extrovertly (Rank et al., 2004). Extrovert individuals are probably characterized by individual flexibility, who can handle some emergent changes (Rank et al., 2004), which is an important condition required by a successful innovator. This is because in innovation process, sometimes a theory does not appear to fit the facts, then team members need to adapt quickly to changing circumstances (Basadur & Gelade, 2006). Also, since extrovert people tend to be gregarious and are interested in seeking out excitement, extroversion can stimulate discussion and high expectations (Rank et al., 2004) and further, can contribute to the wise use of information and communication when making decision, and then persuade other members of the team or even stakeholders in the organization of the value of brand new ideas (Rank et al., 2004).
Proposition 16. The availability of team members with a personality trait of extroversion strengthens the positive relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Figure 5. Member attributes facilitators of the relationships between team empowerment, team creativity, and team innovation.
Just like creativity, implementation is never an easy, smooth or instant process, and during this stage, errors and missteps are always unavoidable because individuals may try to use various new approaches to carry out the creative ideas. In an empowered team with learning orientation, members eagerly engage in experiment, tend to overcome such obstacles by experimenting, adapting and persevering, and feel hardly constrained by fear of failure (Klein & Knight, 2005). Actually, within a learning-oriented team climate, leaders of empowered teams play an important role. They never avoid expressing their own fallibility and need for team members’ assistance and input, always inspire them to find innovative approaches and communicate to team members that they are essential and valued in the change process (Edmondson, Bohmer & Pisano, 2001). In this way, team members, as the innovation operators, regard innovation implementation as a process of learning rather than a huge burden to be endured. At the same time they feel more impact and safety in their team, which can further contribute to the process of transforming novel ideas into practice.
Proposition 17. A team climate of learning orientation strengthens the positive relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Combined participative & directive leadership
Proposition 18. A combined participative and directive leadership style strengthens the positive relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Performance goal setting
Performance or productivity goal setting requires establishing individual and team performance goals or standards (Shalley, 1991). In the idea implementation stage, teams focus on “optimizing” and “implementing” ideas (Basadur & Gelade, 2006), which means that teams should reach a consensus on which alternative should be used. Productivity goal setting results in attention and action to be selective so that jobs with no goals can be ignored (Shalley, 1991). When selecting the exact approaches of carry out creative ideas, team members may be confused by various solutions. With a clear productivity/performance goal, they know better what the standards ask for and can concentrate their attention and efforts on the optimal solutions instead of spending additional time trying which approach to implement. In this way, the selection of ideas can be carried out with higher quality when clear team goals are available.
Proposition 19. Performance goal setting strengthens the relationship between team creativity and team innovation.
Joint influence of inhibitors and facilitators
To this point we have discussed the possible independent influence of inhibitors and facilitators on the relationship between team empowerment and team creativity, and on the link between team creativity and innovation. In addition, we also tentatively discuss the possibility that these inhibitors and facilitators may combine and interact to influence the two relationships.
Much literature has examined the inhibitors (Paulus & Dzindolet, 1993; Paulus, 2000; Klein & Sorra, 1996; Klein & Knight, 2005) and facilitators of creativity and innovation (Oldham & Cummings, 1996; Shalley et al. 2004; Simonton, 2000) respectively, but few directly introduce how the two categories of factors interact with each other. However, inhibiting factors and facilitators can happen simultaneously, in the sense that the negative effects may be to some extent neutralized and overruled by facilitators, and that the positive influence of facilitators becomes weaker due to inhibitors. In order to make teams better avoid inhibitors and develop facilitators to cultivate creativity and innovation, we need to examine the interaction fact of them.
In the present literature, we found few studies focusing on the interaction between inhibitors and facilitators. But based on existing literatures, we argue that the negative effects might be reduced to a substantial extent when facilitators interact with each other and maximize the positive effects. If two facilitators happen simultaneously, each of them can be complementary to the other, bring out the best side of the other and dwarf the potentially slight negativity, thus collaboratively breaking the inhibitors. Therefore, teams need to better develop both individual and team level facilitators mentioned above.
DISCUSSION
Although team empowerment has been associated with creativity and innovation in the context of teams, only a few studies have been focused on how and when the potential drive of team empowerment for creativity and innovation can be unleashed. This paper explores exactly how team empowerment affects the initiation and furthermore the implementation of creative ideas. Kirkman (2000) defined team empowerment as an increased task motivation with four dimensions, namely potency, meaningfulness, autonomy and impact, all of which have been proved to be necessary and effective to connect team empowerment to team creativity.
But team empowerment is not formed inherently in a team, there must be an overall environment for the fostering of it, therefore, three important antecedents are suggested. Team-based HR practices may help improve team members’ potency and meaningfulness through a series of HR practices, such as cross-training. Organizational support provides teams with essential resources and beneficial environment to adopt empowerment. Production/service responsibilities encourage team members to be involved in both strategic and operational activities of the organization, which triggers higher intrinsic motivation and stronger feeling of being empowered.
Stroebe, 1987; Paulus, 2000), to be constrained by established group norms (Pfeffer & Sutton, 1999) and confused by the change of social roles (Klein & Knight, 2005). These factors are all proved to be harmful to the transformation of ideas into practice.
In addition, facilitators are introduced to strengthen the links between team empowerment, team creativity and team innovation. Facilitators securing those processes vary widely, and derive from the differences in between the nature of creativity and innovation. They can be summarized as member attributes and team characteristics. Regarding the member attributes, I have referred to domain-relevant knowledge, thinking skills and personality traits. Domain-relevant knowledge is positive for both securing creativity and innovation within empowered teams. As for the relationship between team empowerment and creativity, it is beneficial for members to bear creative thinking skills and openness to experience personality. On the other hand, convergent thinking and extrovert traits are what the innovation process asks for. Subsequently, team characteristics have been discussed: team climate, leadership and goal setting. It is concluded that idea-generation process requires a team with risk-taking norms, while a learning-orientation atmosphere is beneficial to the implementation of ideas. Additionally, it is argued that participative/supportive leadership can support the creative process in the team, while a combination of supportive and directive style is required in the innovation stage. Finally, it is proved that creativity goal setting can stimulate the initiation of novel ideas, while productivity goal setting makes the innovation process going smoothly.
Finally, we propose the discussion of the joint influence of inhibitors and facilitators. That is, inhibitors and facilitators may happen simultaneously, and their effects may be neutralized by the other party. It is also argued that facilitators can interact with each other to multiply their positive effects and reduce the negativities of the inhibitors.
Limitation
Second, a potential limitation is that the study’s lack of focus on the nature of the task itself. That is, the different situations between simple and complicated tasks have not been investigated. It is possible that the implementation of creative ideas may vary based on the complexity of tasks. For example, the processes of creativity and innovation are less distinguishable for simple tasks, but for complex tasks the situation is the opposite. This may be worth of study in the future.
In addition, based on the nature of creativity and innovation, only cognitive inhibitors are discussed in the creativity process and social interference in the innovation process. Both cognitive and social inhibitions may appear in the creativity process (Paulus, 2000) and innovation process. But this still needs to be further studied. For example, stabilized group norms are likely to obstruct the initiation of novel ideas, and fear of criticism may also turn a good innovator into a conservative operator.
Fourth, this study examines only selected facilitators regarding member attributes and team characteristics. In order to illustrate the general complexity of the creativity and innovation process, there is a need for further elaboration on other member attributes and team characteristics, and even organizational features. For instance, conflict is a controversial topic when mentioning teams, while it is difficult but necessary to handle it well in order to achieve creativity. Also, the appraisal system of an organization may also influence team members’ motivation to be creative.
Finally, we only propose the value of discussing the joint influence of inhibitors and facilitators, but more research should be conducted in future to find out how these inhibitors and facilitators can exactly interact with each other and finally what impact will be on the initiation or implementation of creative ideas. For example, it may be worth of studying how the facilitators can be combined in order to completely offset one of the inhibitors.
Theoretical implication
(West, 2002). Subsequently, most literature only directly relates team creativity with autonomy (Amabile, 1998; Kirkman & Rosen, 1999), which is one of the many components of team empowerment, but this paper implicates all the four dimensions of team empowerment and clarifies how they can contribute to team creativity, which provides more possibilities for novel ideas to be initiated and implemented.
In addition, we have distinguished the concepts of creativity and innovation from the nature of themselves, based on which we assume that some team-inherent characteristics may hinder the development of creative ideas. Although some scholars (e. g. Paulus, 2000; Thompson, 2003) have already realized the dark sides of teams, as mentioned, few of their studies emphasize the distinction of the nature between team creativity and innovation. At the same time, this paper also recognizes different facilitators required for creativity and innovation, again based on the difference of their nature. These facilitators are categorized into member attributes and team characteristics. But more research is needed on the facilitators within each level. What is more, we propose studying the joint influence of inhibitors and facilitators, which sheds light on how to strengthen team creativity and innovation.
Practical implications
The paper examines the role that organizations play in applying team empowerment to generate ideas (creativity), and afterwards transferring those ideas into practice (innovation). It is important that organizations realize these distinctive processes so as to achieve the ultimate success in creativity process and subsequently innovation.
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