Article Summary of Knowledge Diversity and Team Creativity, The Moderating Role of Status Inequality

In this article, the researchers have focused on the moderating role played by status inequality in the teams for their knowledge diversity as well as creativity. The primary focus was given to see the relationship between teams’ creativity and knowledge diversity keeping the status inequality’s moderating role in view. The process chosen to develop hypothesis was based on the framework of input-process-output. The researchers wanted to know about the creativity potential, team knowledge diversity, team creativity, and team status inequality. Therefore, they first reviewed the relevant literature to develop their hypothesis. The first hypothesis for the study was that there will be positive association between team creativity and teams’ task knowledge. Seemingly, the hypothesis two and three were also developed on the basis of literature (PARK, LEW, & LEE, 2018)

The next part of the article is about using the research methods to test these hypotheses. For this purpose, the participant members were taken from 492 teams of 10 Korean companies from different industries. The survey method was used to collect data from these participants. Due to some issues, the final sample used for the study was comprised of 325 teams. Seven functional tasks of different kinds were taken from these respondents of the study. The measures selected for the study were team creativity, team task knowledge, team status inequality, and control variables. Once the data was collected from the respondents, then results were compiled by using the ordinary least squares (OLS) analysis so that hypotheses can be tested accordingly.

The study came with some interesting results in the discussion section after detailing the results. The findings of the study were good enough to support the claim that team’s creativity is enhanced by the team’s diversity in task knowledge. The prior research has also been determined that there is a relationship between team’s creativity and task knowledge diversity, and it was again proved true in this study. The other finding of the study was that team’s creativity and task knowledge was negativity affected when there was status as well as organizational tenure inequality. So, the study found that when teams had higher level of status inequality, then there team creativity was at lowest level. But when teams were enjoying the equal status, the team creativity was at the highest level. The article has proved to be a good one for the future research on the team creativity that how mangers can sue this information to make sure they enhance team creativity with relevant procedures

(a) Reaction of Knowledge Diversity and Team Creativity, The Moderating Role of Status Inequality

In my opinion, the article is a good one for organizations, managers, leaders and researchers in so many ways. I believe that teams creativity is crucial in today’s dynamic business world, where things are changing quickly, and organizations have creativity are differentiated in the market. So, this article is a good insight for the concerned people to see that what can affect the creativity and performance of employees. As per my acquired knowledge, I was quite known to the importance of team creativity for better output of organizations, but this article gave me a chance to look at more important aspects in terms of teams and their performance & creativity. It was nice to get an overview on status inequality among team members, and how it can affect their creativity. I previously had a thought in mind that creativity is concerned with just the creative abilities of an employee. But what this article has found out, it means that even a creative mind will not be able to do well, when team would have status inequality. Now, I very much agree with the findings of the article that when teams will be diverse in task knowledge, but there is no status inequality, then creativity is the most likely thing to happen. But when statues inequality or organizational tenure inequality would be there, then creativity would be affected negatively. I must appreciate the efforts of researchers of this article that how well they have defined everything with detail, which is going to be crucial for future research in this area.

(b) Application of Knowledge Diversity and Team Creativity, The Moderating Role of Status Inequality

It is always great to get some practical knowledge from the research studies to compare with the theoretical knowledge that we gain from the course texts and materials. We have learned about so many concepts in the class regarding team managements and the role of leaders as well as various other relevant aspects. So, it was good to review this article in terms of mapping the creativity and performance of teams based on different factors. To be precise, here the main point was regarding the status inequality that when team members had different statuses or had enough difference in organizational tenure, then team creativity was impacted by these things. It is important for every organization to understand that they could not achieve their goals, if their teams are not working well. The team members need to get together and feel at ease with each other so that they can perform well collectively. The research findings of the article can be applied in the practical fields by organizations to work their best to ensure that there is as minimum status inequality between team members as possible.

Reference of Knowledge Diversity and Team Creativity, The Moderating Role of Status Inequality

PARK, W.-W., LEW, J. Y., & LEE, E. K. (2018). TEAM KNOWLEDGE DIVERSITY AND TEAM CREATIVITY: THE MODERATING ROLE OF STATUS INEQUALITY. SOCIAL BEHAVIOR AND PERSONALITY , 46 (10), 1611–1622