The Emergence of Teams’ Innovativeness in an Organization

Full title: The Emergence of Teams’ Innovativeness in an Organization -- An Examination Based on Paradoxical Management in the Emergence Process

Presenters: Jar-Der Luo, Xin Gao gao, Song Wang, Zi-Qiu Lin, Hu Yang, Yang Yu, Yu Zhang

This panel aims to explore the factors and mechanisms of the emergence of collective intelligence in the organizational context. The data comes from 3693 teams and was collected from one of the largest high-technology companies in China during a 5-year period. Four papers were developed from the research:

The first paper shows that knowledge diversity and teams’ network density form a pair of paradoxical elements, which sometimes reinforce and sometimes restrain each other.

The second paper finds that there are two teams’ knowledge diversification strategies—i.e. hiring new members with different knowledge from the whole company or only hiring those different from other team members, and the former strategy is important during organizational disruptive change, while the latter one is effective in normal time period.

The third paper uses ABM model to explore the dynamic mechanism behind the effect of cognitive diversity on collective intelligence. It finds that repeated cooperation alleviates the paradoxical outcomes of mean and variance caused by diversity.

The fourth paper illustrates that teams’ degree centrality forms a double power-law distribution in our OB data. Built on the ratio of inter-circle and intra-circle collaboration, a theory is developed to explain this phenomenon.

A section of conclusion follows.