Navigating Inter-Team Competition: How Information Broker Teams Achieve Team Innovation

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Yan, Thomas Taiyi; Venkataramani, Vijaya; Tang, Chaoying; Hirst, Giles
• 署名单位: University of London; University College London; University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park; Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, CAS; Australian National University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-9010
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0001216
• 发表日期: 2025
• 页码: 27-48
• 关键词: team innovation; inter-team competition; Brokerage; social networks

摘要

Organizations are increasingly using teams to stimulate innovation. Often, these teams share knowledge and information with each other to help achieve their goals, while also competing for resources and striving to outperform each other. Importantly, based on their industry, the nature of work, or prior history, some teams may face more competition from peer teams than others. Our research examines how teams' competitive relations with other teams in the organization operate in tandem with their collaborative inter-team information exchange relations in impacting their innovation. Using two studies-a field study of 73 knowledge-intensive teams in high-tech engineering firms and a team-based network experimental study of 162 teams-we find that a high degree of overall competition with many peer teams reduces a focal team's ability to acquire and utilize diverse knowledge from these teams (i.e., inter-team knowledge integration), thereby hindering team innovation. However, applying insights from network structural hole theory, we find that when a focal team occupies a brokerage position in the inter-team information exchange network, this can help buffer the effects of competition in getting access to knowledge resources from other teams, thus enabling their innovation. Additionally, we find that focal broker teams' dealmaking and network obstruction behaviors explain these effects.