Team efficacy, feeling of reduced personal accomplishment, and individual creative performance: Team trust as a moderator

Abstract

We studied the interaction of team efficacy and team trust on feeling of reduced personal accomplishment. Data were obtained from a survey conducted with 270 teams made up of 1,787 individual employees of a multinational shipbuilding corporation headquartered in South Korea. We found that when team trust was low, team efficacy was positively related to individual burnout, whereas the relationship was nonsignificant when team trust was high. The feeling of reduced personal accomplishment, was, in turn, negatively related to individual creative performance. Contrary to common intuition about the positive effects of team efficacy, the results suggest that high team efficacy can lead to increased burnout and, ultimately, have a negative impact on creativity under conditions of low team trust. In the process, we also discussed the relative salience of the team as an extension of the self.