Creative capability, Personality and Innovative Output at the Team Level

Despite the wide use of teams for innovative tasks and promising potential benefits of teamwork, much about the determinants of team creativity and innovativeness is still unknown. This study investigates how the team members’ personality moderates the relationship between team creative capability and innovative team output. We analyzed a total of 75 student teams that were instructed to develop innovative business ideas for their term project. While we used subjective measures for team personality, objective assessment methods were used to assess team creative capability. Unlike at the individual level, our results show that extraversion and agreeableness positively moderate the relationship between team creative capability and innovative output. Our findings highlight the important role that the social context plays in teamwork. Moreover, it shows that certain factors can have a strikingly different, or even opposite effect at the team level than they do at the individual level.