The Impact of Shared Leadership on Team Creativity in Innovation Teams—A Chain Mediating Effect Model

Abstract

As an important outcome of team innovation, team creativity has become an important issue in academia and industry. Meanwhile, the horizontal leadership model has been preliminarily proven to be effective in improving the output of innovation performance. Multiple chain mediating effects of team psychological safety climate, cognitive motivation and social motivation on shared leadership and team creativity in innovative teams were proposed on the basis of social network theory and group dynamics theory. In this study, 178 innovation teams and 2011 innovation team members were given questionnaires, and the obtained data were empirically analyzed. The results show that shared leadership has a significant positive effect on team creativity in innovative teams; team psychological safety climates, cognitive motivation and social motivation play a partial mediating role between shared leadership and team creativity, and play a chain mediating role together. At the team level, the study verifies the positive effect of shared leadership on team creativity and reveals the complex team process.