Functional Diversity, Participative Safety, Openness to Experience and Team Innovation A Mediated Moderation Study
Summary
Team innovation is an increasingly researched topic in psychology and is crucial
maintaining organizational success in the global market. Understanding the mechanisms
leading to the most successful outcome of innovation at the team-level is therefore an
important task for both researchers and practitioners. Organizations are progressively
adopting heterogeneous teams and these teams operate positively in distinct contexts.
Specifically, when there is a high sense of participative safety between the members of
the team. This in turn is facilitated by members’ personality trait of openness to
experience. In order to test these relations, the current study proposes a team-level
mediated moderation effect. Data collected from 38 teams consisting of 147 team
members provided no significant results at the team-level data analysis. However, the
individual-level analysis produced significant results. Participative safety and openness
to experience were significant predictors of team innovation. Furthermore, openness to
experience was a further predictor of participative safety. Implications of these results in
terms of recruitment process for innovative teams in organizations and suggestions for
future research and opportunities will be examined at the end of the paper.