Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Theme：Lighting the way or shadowing the shine? The equivocal ripple effects of advice connections with internal- and external-team stars on nonstar’s creativity

Speaker：Kai Zhao (School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China)

Time：2022-03-30 14:00

Address：Online meeiting, Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese

ABSTRACT:

Existing research revealed contradictory findings regarding the social influence of star employees on their nonstar colleague’s creativity: (1) on the one hand, nonstars can leverage stars’ information advantage to enrich their own knowledge bases via seeking advices from stars, which is beneficial to nonstars’ exploration of novel and useful ideas (i.e., the mechanism of learning from stars); (2) on the other hand, stars’ power and status advantage may trigger nonstars’ deference to their viewpoints which may diminish nonstars’ explorative learning and creativity (i.e., the mechanism of compliance to stars). To reconcile the unsolved puzzle in the stardom, this study draws upon theory of team interdependence to identify shared team membership as a key boundary condition which differentiates the stars’ equivocal ripple effects on nonstars’ explorative learning and creativity, and then further elaborates how the external- or internal-team star advisors’ information richness makes differences to the above two competing mechanisms. To test the theoretical model, we conducted two studies. In study 1, using multi-time and multi-source data (including 239 members in 43 teams) from a high-technology company in China, we found that (1) advice connections with external-team stars had a positive indirect effect on nonstar creativity via enhancing nonstar’s explorative learning; (2) advice connections with internal-team stars had a negative indirect effect on nonstar creativity via reducing nonstar’s explorative learning; (3) connected internal-team stars’ information richness moderated the indirect effect of advice connections with internal-team stars on nonstar creativity via nonstar’s explorative learning, such that this indirect effect was more negative when connected external-team stars’ information richness was higher. In study 2, we used a scenario-based experiment of 152 participants from a manager development course hosted by a Chinese university to strengthen the causality of our model; further, we also measured new information acquisition and deference to the star advisors to empirically examine the mechanisms of learning from stars and compliance to stars. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings, the limitations of this study, and future research directions were discussed.