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Team job‐related anxiety and creativity: Investigating team‐level and cross‐level moderated curvilinear relationships
Author(s) -
Mao Jianghua,
Chang Song,
Gong Yaping,
Xie Jia Lin
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of organizational behavior
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.938
H-Index - 177
eISSN - 1099-1379
pISSN - 0894-3796
DOI - 10.1002/job.2489
Subject(s) - cooperativeness , psychology , creativity , social psychology , job satisfaction , anxiety , supervisor , applied psychology , personality , management , temperament , economics , psychiatry
Summary Researchers have examined the effects of individual job‐related anxiety on employee attitudes and behaviors but have yet to examine whether team job‐related anxiety would have similar or different effects. Building on prior research on negative group affective tone and creativity, we propose that team job‐related anxiety has an inverted U‐shaped curvilinear relationship with both team and individual creativity. Furthermore, we posit that team cooperativeness moderates those curvilinear relationships. Using a two‐wave research design and matched employee‐supervisor data from 290 employees nested in 65 teams, we found support for the proposed inverted U‐shaped relationships. Moreover, the intermediate level of team job‐related anxiety was associated with higher individual creativity in teams with higher cooperativeness. We conclude the study with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.