Curious supervisor puts team innovation within reach: Investigating supervisor trait curiosity as a catalyst for collective actions

Ma, Jie (Yonas)

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2023, vol. 175, issue C

Abstract: Popular press and theoretical conjecture imply that curiosity is not just an individual motivation but also an enabler of collective actions. This study seeks to explicate curiosity as a catalyst for collective actions by examining team supervisors’ trait curiosity. We test the idea that trait curiosity predisposes team supervisors to manipulate team-level task structures, which primes certain forms of team regulatory focus and eventually affects team innovation. Two studies using the interest/deprivation (I/D) taxonomy of curiosity revealed that, by predisposing supervisors to create more learning demand, I-type curiosity primes team promotion focus, which facilitates both radical and incremental team innovation. By predisposing supervisors to create more problem-solving demand, d-type curiosity arouses team prevention focus, which facilitates team incremental innovation but hinders radical innovation. The effect of supervisor curiosity is evident only when supervisors have high task authority. This study uncovered a powerful property of curiosity, demonstrating its promising contributions to organizational life.

Keywords: Curiosity; Team innovation; Regulatory focus; Job demands; Radical and incremental innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597823000110
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:175:y:2023:i:c:s0749597823000110

DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2023.104236

Access Statistics for this article

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes is currently edited by John M. Schaubroeck

More articles in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().