The effects of high‐involvement work systems and shared leadership on team creativity: A multilevel investigation

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrm.21988
• Author: Fang Lee Cooke,Zhigang Song,Qinxuan Gu
• Date: 01 March 2020
• Published date: 01 March 2020

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

The effects of high-involvement work systems and shared

leadership on team creativity: A multilevel investigation

Zhigang Song

1

| Qinxuan Gu

1

| Fang Lee Cooke

2

1

Antai College of Economics and Management,

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai,

China

2

Monash Business School, Monash University,

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Correspondence

Qinxuan Gu, Antai College of Economics and

Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University,

1954 Huanshan Road, Shanghai 200030,

China.

Email: qxgu@sjtu.edu.cn;

Funding information

National Social Science Fund of China, Grant/

Award Number: 17ZDA057; National Natural

Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award

Numbers: 71472122, 71832003

Abstract

Understandinghow to effectively stimulate creative potential inthe workplace through

strategic human resource management (HRM) practices is critical to enhancing organi-

zational competitiveness. This study investigates the effects of high-involvement work

systems (HIWS) on team creativity in terms of ability–motivation–opportunity theory

and a team input–process–output model. It draws on a data set consisting of

668 employees from 112 teams in 41 organizations in China. The results reveal that

HIWS are positively related to team creativity, not only directly, but also indirectly

through a sequential mediating mechanism of involvement climate and shared leader-

ship. We argue that when employees are placed in an autonomous work environment

underpinned by HIWS, they will be more likely to be involvedin creative activities and

engage in mutual influence behaviors in their work teams, and lead each other to

achieve a higher level of creativity. Our study extends the knowledge on strategic

HRM/HIWS, sharedleadership, and creativity.

KEYWORDS

ability, motivation, and opportunity, China, high-involvement work systems, involvement

climate, shared leadership, team creativity

1|INTRODUCTION

Creativity has been widely recognized as one of the most important

sources of sustainable competitive advantage for organizations

(Anderson, Poto

cnik, & Zhou, 2014; Shin & Zhou, 2007). With organi-

zations relying increasingly on teams to carry out creative work, the

challenge presented to organizations is how to encourage collective

contributions while also promoting individual efforts (Eisenbeiss, van

Knippenberg, & Boerner, 2008; Hoever, Van Knippenberg, Van Gin-

kel, & Barkema, 2012). As teams are embedded in organizations,

scholars have recognized the potentially significant impact of organi-

zational level factors on how teams perform (Cohen & Bailey, 1997;

Ma, Long, Zhang, Zhang, & Lam, 2017). However, although strategic

human resource management (HRM) is seen as one of the most com-

mon organizational contextual factors, very little is known about the

effect of strategic HRM on team creativity. Although existing studies

have linked strategic HRM to individual employee creativity

(e.g., Chang, Jia, Takeuchi, & Cai, 2014; Liu, Gong, Zhou, & Huang,

2017), it is premature to assume that certain HRM practices would

have the same effect on team creativity as they do on individual crea-

tivity, since team creativity is not merely the sum of its individual parts

(Gong, Kim, Lee, & Zhu, 2013).

Accordingly, our study aims to investigate whether and how high-

involvement work systems (HIWS) affect team creativity. Specifically,

we take HIWS as an example of strategic HRM for several reasons.

Existing literature often treats HIWS with high-performance work sys-

tems (HPWS) and those with high-commitment work systems

(HCWS) as the same and uses them interchangeably. However, not all

human resource (HR) practices in HPWS are beneficial to employees

if they are performance-oriented in terms of the firm without being

employee-oriented at the same time. Indeed, according to one of the

few studies concerning HRM and team creativity, certain HPWS bun-

dles were not related to team creativity (Ma et al., 2017). In addition,

HIWS was assumed to imply high commitment, which was not,

DOI: 10.1002/hrm.21988

Hum Resour Manage. 2020;59:201–213. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrm © 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 201