Functional Diversity, Participative Safety, Openness to Experience and Team Innovation A Mediated Moderation Study

Abstract

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.