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Despite the clear relevance of stressors for the creative work performed by individuals, how they affect teams in their ability to innovate is poorly understood. Thus, the question as to what kind of, and by which mechanisms, team stressors may give rise to better innovation team performance needs further consideration. We address this issue by applying the challenge–hindrance stressor framework to the team level of analysis in the context of innovation teams. By integrating insights from social identity theory and the attentional focus model, we highlight the importance of identity- and information-based mechanisms in transmitting the differential effects of challenge and hindrance team stressors on the performance of innovation teams. We test our arguments for two of the most prominent indicators of innovation team performance (i.e., team creativity and team efficiency) in a multi-informant sample of team members, team-internal leaders, and team-external managers from 114 innovation teams. Our findings support the opposing effects of challenge and hindrance team stressors in predicting innovation team performance through the two differential mechanisms. Specifically, for team efficiency, both team stressors come with the cost of team task conflict (i.e., the information-based mechanism). However, whereas challenge team stressors enhance collective team identification (i.e., the identity-based mechanism), hindrance team stressors undermine collective team identification, thereby aggravating their already negative effect on team efficiency. In terms of team creativity, our results suggest that both types of team stressors exert their indirect effects solely via the identity-based mechanism. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Their positive potential often diminishes or even turns negative when antecedents of creativity are taken too far. Despite empirical evidence supporting such curvilinear effects on important outcomes of creative work at the individual and team levels, their theorizing remains rather incomplete, with more attention being paid to explaining the curves’ upward rather than downward slopes. By developing a multilevel antecedent-benefit-cost (ABC) framework that synthesizes 120 quantitative-empirical studies on curvilinear effects, this review guides creativity and innovation literature toward conceptual clarity and methodological precision across levels. This is important because the cost-related mechanisms of certain antecedents are still not well understood.

Findings in the extant literature are mixed concerning when and how gender diversity benefits team performance. We develop and test a model that posits that gender-diverse teams outperform gender-homogeneous teams when perceived time pressure is low, whereas the opposite is the case when perceived time pressure is high. Drawing on the categorization-elaboration model (CEM; van Knippenberg, De Dreu, & Homan, 2004), we begin with the assumption that information elaboration is the process whereby gender diversity fosters positive effects on team performance. However, also in line with the CEM, we argue that this process can be disrupted by adverse team dynamics. Specifically, we argue that as time pressure increases, higher gender diversity leads to more team withdrawal, which, in turn, moderates the positive indirect effect of gender diversity on team performance via information elaboration such that this effect becomes weaker as team withdrawal increases. In an experimental study of 142 four-person teams, we found support for this model that explains why perceived time pressure affects the performance of gender-diverse teams more negatively than that of gender-homogeneous teams. Our study sheds new light on when and how gender diversity can become either an asset or a liability for team performance.

In today's complex business world, the diversities within organizations, within teams, and of individual employees have emerged as a source of competitive advantage that can enhance creativity at multiple levels of analysis. However, the relationship between diversity and creativity at and across the individual, team, and organizational levels remains a topic of debate, despite ongoing scholarly interest. In this article, we address this debate by conducting a comprehensive multilevel review of 119 empirical studies that explores the effects of diversity on creativity. To structure this body of literature, we review studies based on their levels of analysis as well as the degrees of job-relatedness and the observability of diversity attributes they investigate. This approach helps to enable the discussion of the differential effects that numerous diversity attributes can have on creativity at the individual, team, and organizational levels, thus uncovering promising avenues for future research. Our multilevel perspective particularly points toward the heightened need for more cross-level and dynamic research designs and for extending conceptual ideas well known at one level of analysis to phenomena less understood at other levels of analysis. These approaches should improve the understanding of the complex, and therefore still puzzling, role of diversity for creativity.

The contemporary work environment is characterized by an ongoing trend to embed employees in teams because of their expected abilities for handling complex tasks and integrating diverse sets of knowledge and skills. However, leveraging this potential is endangered by stimuli within and outside of teams that take a toll on cohesion and teamwork among team members. Understanding the role that stressors and demands play in the work-related functioning of teams and their members is therefore an increasingly important challenge in the organizational behavior literature. Whereas research on stressors and demands has primarily focused on the individual level, we expand the research scope by considering these phenomena to be multilevel. We perform an interdisciplinary review of the literature on these stimuli in teams and show how related research, such as that on destructive leadership, may benefit from a more balanced account and integration of frameworks on stressors. Our multilevel review is informative for the literature on stressors and demands at the individual and team levels, as it offers an important conceptual grounding for how and why various stimuli in this social environment differentially influence both the collective entity and its individual team members.

Successful teams tend to be highly cohesive and team cohesion to be particularly helpful in allowing teams and their members to sustain their success even in the most challenging times. One disillusioning consequence of this reciprocity between cohesion and performance would suggest that failures made by teams and/or their members likely jeopardize their success by preventing them from capitalizing on such virtuous circles associated with team cohesion. Yet, many teams uphold their performance despite the failures they have to cope with, suggesting that the potential vicious circles can be overcome. This chapter aims at illuminating the vicious and virtuous circles associated with team cohesion that are induced by either collective failures of teams or individual failures of their members. It therefore offers a multilevel perspective not only on the emergence and diffusion of failures at the individual and team levels, but also on the critical role that team cohesion plays for a team’s (dys)functional coping across these levels. It is theorized that collective failures triggered exogenously can help build team cohesion, and that whether endogenously-triggered collective failures bring about the vicious or the virtuous circles of team cohesion depends on whether the individual failures developing into collective failures are triggered endogenously or exogenously. The implications of this conceptual work are discussed in light of the literatures on error/failure management and group cohesiveness.

Research on authentic leadership has yielded important insights about its effects on subordinates. However, its consequences for the leaders themselves remain largely unexamined. This is problematic, as organizations require their leaders to provide guidance and leaders' mental well-being is a prerequisite for this. Drawing on the theories of ego-depletion and authentic leadership, we investigate the role of authentic leadership in predicting leaders' mental well-being. In an experience sampling study, we apply hierarchical linear modeling to analyze 396 observations from 44 executives. Our multilevel moderated mediation analyses reveal that authentic leadership reduces leaders' stress and increases their work engagement and that these effects are mediated by leader mental depletion. Moreover, we show that the indirect effects are contingent on the extent to which leaders interact with their subordinates: authentic leaders deplete less with increasing follower interaction, while inauthentic leaders deplete less with decreasing follower interaction.

The intersection between the work and nonwork domains is increasingly blurred, which calls for scrutiny of how the latter can be enriched by demands faced at work. The literature suggests that work...

During times of crises, employees turn to their managers for information and guidance. Human resource (HR) research highlights the pivotal role of HR strength, which refers to distinctive, consiste...

In today’s complex and dynamic business environment, the diversity in organizations, their teams, and even their individual employees has emerged as source of competitive advantage by being a key p...

Organizations more than ever demand their employees to be creative to ensure organizational performance and growth. Therefore, knowledge about the determinants of employee creativity is of substant...

Experiencing failure and setbacks in academic careers is almost inevitable. Early career professionals who do not yet have permanent positions may be particularly impacted by these challenges becau...

Inter-organizational collaboration through joint teams with members from multiple organizations has become an organizational reality. As research has shown team composition to be a predictor of tea...

High dropout rates in STEM disciplines are certainly among the most crucial challenges that higher education institutions are facing. Fortunately, recent research provides initial evidence for resi...

Today’s working environment is experiencing an ongoing trend to embed employees in collectives like teams and work groups. The understanding of what role specific team stressors play in the work-re...

Accept the challenge and rise to the occasion! This notion, to which managers often return to in motivating both themselves and their employees, is surely easier said than done, given that various boundary conditions influence as to how challenging stimuli potentially translate into something positive. Such contingencies, which may function as buffering resources, lie within the individuals themselves (i.e., intrapersonal resources) and in their social relationships and organizational surroundings (i.e., interpersonal resources). On the individual level, the effective buffering through intrapersonal resources is shown to depend on their match with the domains of the stressor and the outcome. However, this domain-matching hypothesis appears to be limited for the explanation of buffering effects across levels. With the cross-level extension of this article, I provide an explanation of matches and mismatches between stressors and potential buffering resources across the individual and team levels. This level...

Do charismatic leadership behaviors of the top management team matter? While such behaviors of the CEO have been found to relate to a variety of positive performance- related outcomes at the firm a...

Research on authentic leadership has proliferated throughout the past decade and has surfaced many important insights about this leadership style’s effects on subordinates. What has gone largely un...

Drawing on the challenge-hindrance stressor framework and the job demands-control-support model, this study investigates the moderating role of goal clarity and peer support within the relationship...

Research has invested a great deal of effort to explain how individuals’ behaviors are affected by job demands and how job resources may assist them in upholding motivation and engagement. However,...

Despite the clear relevance and the numerous investigations of workplace stressors for individuals to excel, such stimuli affecting team members embedded in the social context of work groups are le...

What was not said is often as important as what was. Words are acutely important in conveying opinions or assign tasks in a clear way. The lack of such clarity creates ambiguity and this in turn ma...

Innovating activities are affected by a multitude of stressors. Although their impact on innovation project teams’ performance is increasingly investigated in stress literature, their influence on ...