Team Innovation

Team innovation is of growing importance in research in organizational
psychology and organizational behavior as well as organizational practice. I
review the empirical literature in team innovation to draw integrative conclusions
about the state of the science and to provide a research agenda to move
the field forward. The review identifies two main perspectives in team innovation
research, the knowledge integration perspective and the team climate
perspective. Key conclusions focus on the need to integrate these perspectives
to develop an integrative contingency model of the factors providing
teams with diverse informational resources and the factors influencing the
extent to which teams integrate these resources in a process of information
exchange and integration. As part of these integrative efforts, construct consolidation
efforts are important to reverse the tendency for proliferation of
substantially overlapping moderators and mediators proposed. The review
also identifies the contingencies of the relationship between idea development
and idea implementation as the most important understudied issue in
team innovation research.