Making or Breaking Team Creativity: Trust in Teams and Member Relational Orientation
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Creativity in teams requires members to simultaneously share ideas and critically examine them. In this context, we propose that trust exerts dual effects on team creativity due to its known effects on psychological safety and participation as well as on accommodation and lower monitoring. We thus examine a boundary condition--team relational orientation-- under which trust in teams can foster or suppress team creativity depending on the relational orientation of team members. In contrast, distrust is expected to have a negative effect on team creativity regardless of the level of team member relational orientation. Results show that trust in teams can promote creativity, but only when team members are high on relational orientation. When team members are low on relational orientation, team trust lowers both the number and quality of creative ideas. This pattern of results underscores the importance of considering member composition when leveraging team trust for creativity in teams.
