One of Us or One of My Friends: How Social Identity and Tie Strength Shape the Creative Generativity of Boundary-Spanning Ties
By Gina Dokko, Aimée A. Kane, Marco Tortoriello. 2014
115 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social ties to colleagues on other work teams can spur creative ideas and workplace innovation by exposing an individual to diverse knowledge. However, for external knowledge to be recombined into innovation, the knowledge must first be recognized as potentially valuable. Going beyond traditional structural explanations, we predict that the use of diverse knowledge to generate creative ideas and solutions will depend in part on employees’ psychological attachment to the organizational groups to which they belong, i.e., their social identity, and the strength of their social ties. We test our hypotheses in an R&D division of a global high-technology firm, finding that social identity influences the creative generativity of boundary-spanning ties. Specifically, stronger team identity renders interactions with colleagues on other work teams less generative of creative ideas, while identification with an overarching, superordinate group (e.g., a division) enhances creative generativity. We also hypothesize and find that tie strength attenuates the negative effect of team identity.
Subfields: Communication, Social Psychology, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0ebf482839980378de50253d53f9c0aee304754a
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In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- “SEW” What Do We Know and Where Do We Go? A Review of Socioemotional Wealth and a Way Forward (2020, background): “For instance, theories regarding identity and social ties have been leveraged across organizational research in a variety of contexts (e.g., Dokko et al., 2014).”