The curvilinear relationship between team member boundary-spanning differentiation and creativity

Team creativity, as one of the most important sources of organizational competitiveness and continuous innovation, requires rich and non-redundant information from both internal and external sources. Although an emerging line of research has shed light on the role of team boundary-spanning activity in promoting creativity, it has solely focused on the mean level of team boundary-spanning activity and rarely addressed the fact that not all team members engage in boundary-spanning behaviors to the same extent. In this study, we broaden the existing knowledge by examining when and how the pattern of team boundary spanning, particularly the differentiation in team member boundary-spanning activities, promotes team creativity. Based on the categorization-elaboration model, we propose a curvilinear relationship between team member boundary-spanning differentiation and creativity that is mediated through information sharing. Further, we add an important layer of understanding to the nature of this curvilinear relationship by identifying team goal interdependence as an important moderator. Using multisource data collected from two time points in 70 teams, we have received general support for our hypotheses. As such, we enrich the conversation about the importance of team boundary spanning by answering “Whether team boundary-spanning differentiation fosters creativity, and when and how?”.