Team Innovation

Abstract

Team innovation is of growing importance in research in organizational psychology and organizational behavior as well as organizational practice. I review the empirical literature in team innovation to draw integrative conclusions about the state of the science and to provide a research agenda to move the field forward. The review identifies two main perspectives in team innovation research, the knowledge integration perspective and the team climate perspective. Key conclusions focus on the need to integrate these perspectives to develop an integrative contingency model of the factors providing teams with diverse informational resources and the factors influencing the extent to which teams integrate these resources in a process of information exchange and integration. As part of these integrative efforts, construct consolidation efforts are important to reverse the tendency for proliferation of substantially overlapping moderators and mediators proposed. The review also identifies the contingencies of the relationship between idea development and idea implementation as the most important understudied issue in team innovation research.