关键词: 子团队, 子团队平衡性, 团队情感, 团队创造力

Abstract: Previous study of team creativity focused more on individual- or team-level factors. Because of the deep research of team diversity and team faultlines, researchers realized that it is worthy to shift their focus to subgroup-level because subgroups can strongly influence team processes and outcomes (e.g., creativity). However, previous studies findings about the influence of subgroups and subgroups’ configurational properties on the team were mainly negative. In order to explore positive findings, this study focuses on knowledge-based subgroups and combines subgroup balance (balance or imbalance) with team affective dimension (from the homogeneous aspect; e.g., group positive affect) to explore their influence on team creativity, illustrating that influence from the angle of information processing. We proposed that: the subgroup balance and group affect will interact with each other to influence team creativity; moreover, the balance of subgroup and group positive affect will have benefit on team creativity simultaneously. Data were obtained from 56 teams, 333 students, in a university via lab experiments. Each of the teams was asked to design a public service announcement by taking “Education” as the theme. Team creativity was assessed by five independent experts, with scope from 1 to 10 (1 stands for least creative and 10 stands for most creative). As this study focuses on knowledge-based subgroups’ balance, we controlled participants’ majors to design whether subgroups are balance or not. When it comes to the group affective dimension, participants in the same team were induced to experience positive (or neutral) emotion/mood by recalling their success stories (or doing an easy math test) because this study values group homogeneous state affect. The simple version of PANAS (Bledow, Rosing, & Frese, 2013) was adopted to measure their affect after induction. This study’s main results are as follows: a) subgroup balance and group affect (positive/neutral) will interact with each other to influence team creativity; b) balanced subgroups and group positive affect will have benefit on team creativity simultaneously; c) when imbalanced subgroups exist in teams, compare with group neutral affect, group positive affect will lead to a larger volatility of team creativity. There are several theoretical implications of this study. Firstly this study’s results prove that it is necessary to combine knowledge-based subgroups’ configuration properties with group affect to research their impacts on team creativity or even team outcomes. Secondly, this study’s results emphasize that group affect can be more specifically studied in the future by shifting research focus from team-level to subgroup level. To sum up, this paper not only enriches existing research and broadens research directions, but also provides practical guidance and relevant value for the modern enterprise management to some degree.

Key words: subgroups, subgroup balance, group affect, team creativity