Illuminating opposing performance effects of stressors in innovation teams
Stefan Razinskas, Matthias Weiss, Martin Hoegl, Markus Baer
kHUB post date: March 18, 2024
Originally published: March 26, 2022 (PDMA JPIM • Vol. 39, Issue 3 • May 2022)
Read time: 45 minutes
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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.
Practitioner Points
- Depending on their nature and the underlying mechanism, team stressors can benefit or harm the creativity and efficiency of innovation teams.
- Although challenging innovation teams seems to hold some promise in terms of strengthening collective team identification, innovation managers should not underestimate the attendant costs of performance-detracting debates at which such desired benefits are actually realized.
- Given the inevitability of some team stressors, leaders are advised to be sensitive toward any signs that collective team identification is eroding and task-related conflicts are escalating to prevent such stressors from compromising innovation team performance.