Relationship between team diversity and innovation: The moderating effect of team leaders´ innovative characteristics

Innovation is an essential condition for enterprises to maintain their competitive advantage. Therefore, many enterprises attempt to find the factors which could achieve innovation. Prior studies have found that team diversity, which include relation-oriented diversity, task-oriented diversity, and deep-level diversity, plays an important role in team innovation, but the results are inconsistent. Furthermore, we find that team leaders´ innovative characteristic has a great impact on team innovation. However, few studies have investigated the moderating effect of team leaders´ innovative characteristic in the relationship between team diversity and innovation. Therefore, we regard team leaders´ innovative characteristic as the moderator to explore the relationship between team diversity and innovation. In this study, we draw on data from 24 teams in manufacturing, and service industries. Finally, the empirical results find that relations-oriented diversity has positive effect on team innovation, and deep-level diversity has negative effect on team innovation. Moreover, this finding also shows that team leaders´ innovative characteristic has partly positive moderating effect in this study.