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| Team Formalization, Team Integration and Team Creativity：the Moderated Chain Mediating Model |
| Liu Xinmei,Chen Weiyi,Li Zhiyong |
| (School of Management, Xi′an Jiaotong University, Xi'an 710048, China) |
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Abstract An organization cannot survive without the support of its formalization. Similarly, as the basic unit of the organization, a high-performing team cannot work effectively without clear rules. By clarifying responsibilities and codes of conduct, written guidelines provide team members with legal rights and help team members collaborate closely with consistent cognition, and react quickly and effectively to all situations in a built-in decision-making system, thus enhancing team creativity in a climate of mutual trust, respect and connection. Thus, team formalization is crucial to team creativity. However, prior research focuses on organizational formalization and argues that organizational formalization is detrimental to organizational innovation. Theoretical research and practical research focusing on the positive attributes of team formalization are relatively scare. Less is discussed concerning about the mechanism between team formalization and team creativity. Moreover，previous studies have not investigated the relationship between team formalization and team creativity.Hence, whether and how team formalization affects team creativity remains to be further explored.#br#Drawing on the theory of planned behavior, this study constructs a model of how formalization influences team creativity through cognitive integration and affective integration, and of how peer monitoring moderates the chain mediating effect. Formalization relates to the extent to which rules are clearly specified and procedures standardized. Team creativity is defined as the production of novel and useful ideas. By answering the question of‘to what extent of peer monitoring formalization facilitates team creativity,’ the mechanism and boundary conditions of team formalization on team creativity are clarified, which is helpful to develop effective norms and improve the team creativity.#br#This paper makes the multiple regression and the moderated chain mediating analysis and presents a multi-source study of 79 teams. It is found that (1) formalization facilitates affective integration through cognitive integration; (2) affective integration positively relates to team creativity; (3) peer monitoring moderates the relationship between affective integration and team creativity, and affective integration facilitates team creativity when peer monitoring is low rather than high; (4)under low peer monitoring rather than high peer monitoring, formalization facilitates team creativity via cognitive integration and affective integration.#br#The theoretical contributions of this study are mainly as follows. Firstly, by revealing the mediating role of team integration between team formalization and team creativity, this paper provides a perspective for exploring the mechanism between team formalization and team effectiveness. Previous studies on the mediating role of organizational formalization primarily focused on the perspective of organizational knowledge management. Following the theory of planned behavior, this study integrates cognitive integration and affective integration to analyze the mechanism of team formalization on team creativity through team cognition. By clarifying the two dimensions of team cognition, team cognitive integration, and affective integration, it clarifies the mediating mechanism of team formalization—team integration—team creativity. Secondly, from the perspective of peer monitoring, this study analyzes the varied impacts of affective integration on team creativity at different levels of peer monitoring. By analyzing the positive moderating effect of low-level peer supervision, it is confirmed that affective integration facilitates team creativity, which further expands the boundary condition cognition of the relationship between affective integration and team creativity. Finally, the study explores the mechanism of team formalization on team creativity through cognitive integration and affective integration based on the theory of planned behavior, and reveals the relationship between the impact of team formalization on team creativity under high-level peer monitoring and low-level peer monitoring. Through analyzing the effects of team formalization, team integration, and peer monitoring on team creativity, the study verifies that team formalization has a positive impact on team creativity with the mediating role of cognitive integration and affective integration under low-level peer monitoring. Therefore this paper answers the question of to what extent peer monitoring formalization facilitates team creativity, and broadens the understanding of the mediating mechanism and the moderating effectiveness toward formalization.#br#
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Received: 15 July 2021
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