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| Influence Mechanism of Team-member Exchange Differentiation on Team Innovation |
| Chen Chao1,Liu Xinmei2 |
| (1.Business School, Hohai University, Nanjing 211100, China;2.School of Management, Xi′an Jiaotong University，Xi′an 710049, China) |
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Abstract With the increasingly fierce market competition, a team has gradually become the basic unit for organizations to promote innovation. In innovative tasks, team-member exchange (TMX) relationship runs through the whole innovation process, thus, TMX has a significant impact on team innovation. However, due to differences in expertise, personality and other aspects among team members, members in teams may maintain high-quality exchange relationships with some colleagues, while maintaining low-quality exchange relationships with others, thus forming TMX differentiation. We are triggered to ask how and when TMX differentiation affects team innovation. Until now, even though much more scholars have focused on horizontal interactional relationship, the influence of TMX differentiation on team innovation hasn't been explored. Moreover, some scholars have called for further research on the impact of TMX differentiation on team output including team innovation in the future. Therefore, based upon the social cognitive theory, this study takes both horizontal and vertical interactional relationships into consideration simultaneously and builds up a moderated mediation model to explore the influence mechanism of TMX differentiation on team innovation. Moreover, the mediating role of team cognitive integration and the moderating role of relational transparency are examined.
This study uses a survey data from 74 teams and 396 members in more than ten high-technology firms from Northern China with a multiple-source, time-lagged research design, and then employs statistics analysis methods including SPSS and analyzes the data to test the proposed hypotheses.
The results are as follows. First, TMX differentiation makes a negative influence on team innovation. Second, TMX differentiation affects team cognitive integration negatively. Third, team cognitive integration is positively related to team innovation, and cognitive integration mediates the association between TMX differentiation and team innovation. Fourth, relational transparency moderates the relationship between TMX differentiation and team cognitive integration, and TMX differentiation has a stronger negative impact on team cognitive integration under low relational transparency than under high relational transparency. Finally, relational transparency moderates the mediated relationship between TMX differentiation and team innovation (via team cognitive integration), to be more specific, the mediated relationship is much stronger under low relational transparency than under high relational transparency.
By exploring the impact of TMX differentiation on team outputs by linking TMX differentiation to team innovation,this stduy enriches the current research on the mediating mechanism of the influence of TMX differentiation on team innovation by exploring the mediating role of team cognitive integration.Moreover it verifies the effectiveness of both horizontal interactional relationship (i.e., TMX differentiation) and vertical interactional relationship (i.e., relational transparency) in the same model, and broadens the applicable scope of relational transparency by finding out the moderating role of relational transparency played in the relationship between TMX differentiation and team innovation. The findings of this study enhance the understanding of the relationship between TMX differentiation and team innovation, expand the exploration of TMX differentiation, and enrich team innovation and TMX differentiation fields. In addition, it calls for further investigation of the effectiveness of TMX differentiation in future studies. The research results of this paper also have significance for team innovation in practice. First, for team leaders, they should provide more chance to communicate with team members so that more innovative ideas can be put forward and carried out. For instance, team leaders can hold seminars or meetings where team members can work together to solve specific innovative jobs. For team members, they ought to find out the strengths of other colleagues from TMX differentiation instead of focusing on unfairness. For example, members should ask for advice and learn from their coworkers when collaborating on the same task. Second, team leaders should encourage team members to chat with each other in order that members can trust each other and find out solutions to accomplish team tasks as if they share daily information, thus promoting team innovation. Finally, team leaders should focus on improving relational transparency. For example, when leading members complete team innovation tasks, team leaders can clearly express their intention and pay attention to whether subordinates understand accurately, so as to improve work efficiency. Team leaders should tolerate mistakes so that their subordinates can feel their sincerity and humility.
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Received: 28 June 2021
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