Study Of The Effect Of Transformational Leadership On Team Member Creativity In Crowdsourcing Innovation Projects

Crowdsourcing Innovation Projects(CIPs)have become the focus of both business and academia because CIPs can be able to concentrate the wisdom of the Internet users on helping enterprises to break through innovation bottleneck and obtain innovative solutions with high value efficiently and at low cost.In CIPs,the core issue that team leaders need to solve is that how to motivate the team to break the time and space constraints in a limited time so as to maximize team member creativity and team creativity.Transformational leadership has been proven to be able to promote team member creativity by enhancing team members' goal and showing high performance expectations for team members to perform beyond the established goals.Since team members mostly adopt social media,e.g.crowdsourcing platforms as communicating tools,the lack of face-to-face interaction makes it difficult for transformational leaders to motivate team members by some inspiring ways such as infectious speech.The direct effect of transformational leadership on team member creativity seems to be weakened.The mechanism of the effect of transformational leadership on member creativity may have changed.Therefore,it is necessary to carry out a new investigation based on the background of CIPs.This study intends to investigate how transformational leadership affects team member creativity from the perspectives of theoretical research and tool application.From the perspective of theoretical mechanism,Study I investigates how transformational leadership influences team member creativity through the key path of knowledge sharing based on social exchange theory.On the basis of improving team member creativity,transformational leadership needs to further enhance team creativity so as to achieve the goal of enhancing CIPs' performance finally.From the perspective of tool application,Study II extends research to the team level and carries out a study of prejudgment management.Based on the Hidden Markov Model,Study II builds a model of the impact of transformational leaders' gamification tools on team creativity.Methods of experiments and objective data mining are used to test two studies respectively.The result of Study I shows that transformational leadership,working as a role of moderator,has significant moderate effect on the relationship between economic reward and knowledge sharing,and positively influences team member creativity through the mediating role of knowledge sharing.On the tool application side,the result of Study II shows that one of the gamification tools,virtual badge can stimulate teams in high creativity state to maintain high level team creativity as well as motivate teams in low creativity state to transfer to the medium state.The study gives a discussion about the results of data analysis,as well as theoretical and practical contribution,especially how transformational leadership integrates the results of two studies to motivate team member creativity and team creativity.The study also discusses research limitations and future study directions.