Linking Cognitive Team Diversity to Team Creativity: A Moderated Mediation Model

Even though many scholars and practitioners have praised the merits of team diversity on team creative outcomes, organizations often fail to reap the benefits from diversity, or even suffer losses. The inconsistent consequences of diversity have prompted researchers to resolve this puzzle, shifting the direction of research toward identifying mediating mechanisms and/or boundary conditions of the relationship between diversity and creativity. In this paper, we proposed a model to test the effect of cognitive team diversity on team creativity through team information elaboration, and further examined the conditional effect of team-member exchange (TMX) on aforementioned mechanism. We tested our hypotheses with multi-source data composed of 62 teams (293 respondents) in Korean electronic and construction companies. Results demonstrated that cognitive team diversity was positively related to team creativity, mediated by team information elaboration. In addition, findings also showed that TMX played an important moderating role such that it amplified the indirect positive effect of cognitive team diversity on team creativity. Drawing upon the findings of this research, we discussed theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and directions for future research.