The Influence Mechanisms Of Zhong-yong Thinking And Cultural Intelligence On Creative Performance In Inter-organizational Teams

Economic development,the emergence of the knowledge economy,and intensification of market competition have resulted in an increasing number of organizations establishing inter-organizational teams to facilitate collaborative innovation.Inter-organizational teams comprise employees from different organizations.The diversity of such teams provides different resources and information for the development of creativity;however,it also results in obstacles in resource integration and leads to organizational culture conflict.Therefore,in order to cope with these challenges,leaders and members in inter-organizational teams need to be equipped with the abilities of coordination and interaction.In Chinese inter-organizational teams,zhong-yong thinking,as a cognition style which roots in Chinese traditional culture,help leaders effectively coordinate different members,handle conflicts and integrate resources.Moreover,employees with higher cultural intelligence,that is ability,can deal with organizational culture differences and conflicts,thereby prompting interpersonal interaction and resource sharing.The existing literatures about inter-organizational collaborative innovation including team innovation and employee creativity are scarce.To sum up,given Chinese culture context and organizational culture differences,the present study focuses on zhong-yong thinking and cultural intelligence.The purpose of the present study is to investigate how zhoug-yong thinking and cultural intelligence influence team and employees' creative performance in inter-organizational teams from the cultural perspective including cognition and ability.This study includes three child studies:(1)The influence mechanism of leader's zhong-yong thinking on team and employees' creative performance.Based on the trait-based perspectives of leadership theory,the first study investigates the influence of leader's zhong-yong thinking on creative performance including the mediate effect of the support for innovation and the moderating role of team interdependence.(2)The influence mechanism of employees' cultural intelligence on creative performance.Based on the trait activation theory,the second study investigates the influence of cultural intelligence on employees' creative performance and the imoderating role of team conflict.(3)The mutual influence mechanism of leader's zhong-yong thinking and employees' cultural intelligence on team and employees' creative performance.Based on the theory of team learning,the third study investigates the influence of team cultural intelligence on creative performance including the mediate effect of team learning and the moderating role of leader's zhong-yong thinking.First,the present study reviews the relevant literatures and concepts.Then we elaborate the research design and data collection process,using the software of SPSS,Lisrel,and HLM to analyze the data and verify the proposed hypothesis.Finally,we discuss the result of the present study,and expound the theoretical and practical significances.The main conclusions of this study as follows:(1)Leader's zhong-yong thinking is positively associated with team and employees' creative performance.Meanwhile,support for innovation fully mediates these positive relationships.Additionally,high task interdependence weakens the relationship between leader's zhong-yong thinking and support for innovation.By contrast,high outcome interdependence strengthens such relationship.(2)Cultural intelligence is positively associated with employees'creative performance.Team conflict is a significant contextual factor and influences the expression of cultural intelligence.The relationship between cultural intelligence and creative performance is strengthened in the context of high relationship conflict.By contrast,when task conflict is high,creative performance depends less on cultural intelligence.(3)Team cultural intelligence significantly influences team and employees' creative performance through team leaning.Additionally,leader's zhong-gong thinking positively moderates the relationship between team learning and team and employees' creative performance.However,the moderating effect of leader's zhong-yong thinking on the relationship between team cultural intelligence and team learning is not significant.The theoretical contributions of this study as follows:(1)We focus on the effect of zhong-yong thinking and cultural intelligence during the process of inter-organizational collaborative innovation from cultural perspective,which enriches the relevant studies on inter-organizational collaborative innovation.(2)Given the research background of Chinese culture,we investigate how leader's zhong-yong thinking influences creative performance,which advances the understanding of the role of leader cognition style and trait-based perspectives of leadership theory in creativity research.(3)Given the organizational culture differences,we extend the concept of cultural intelligence to inter-organizational context.Then we investigate the effect of cultural intelligence on employees,creative performance,which enriches the relevant researches on cultural intelligence and highlights the important role of cultural intelligence in the domain of creativity.(4)We also investigate the mutual effect of team cultural intelligence and leader's zhong-yong thinking on creative performance in inter-organizational teams,which further advances the understanding of cognition and ability during the process of inter-organizational collaborative innovation.The practical significances of this study as follows:first,Chinese organizations should select leaders with high zhong-yong thinking and employees with high cultural intelligence to participate in inter-organizational teams.Moreover,organizations need to provide the relevant training to improve leader's zhong-yong thinking and employees' cultural intelligence.Organizations also should emphasize on the intermediate process how zhong-yong thinking and cultural intelligence influence creative performance,and create the relevant team process such as support for innovation and team learning.Finally,organizations need to focus on matching between strategies and team environments.Managers should adopt different strategies to develop creativity under different level of interdependence and conflict.