The Curvilinear Relationship Between Shared Leadership and Team Creativity in Time-constrained Teams

In practice, time-constrained teams are increasingly commonplace to accomplish specific tasks. Although it is widely assumed that shared leadership is beneficial to team creativity, the potential outcomes of shared leadership in time-constrained teams may be uncertain. Drawing on social information processing theory, we reason that shared leadership has an inverted-U-shaped relationship with team creativity, such that moderate shared leadership can foster team creativity via team voice in time-constrained teams. Besides, we propose that team voice also has an inverted-U-shaped effect on team creativity in time-constrained teams, which is moderated by temporal leadership. To examine our predictions, we collected data from 83 leaders and their 560 subordinates in the business simulation courses. Across our studies, our data support the inverted-U-shaped relationship between shared leadership and team creativity, as well as team voice and team creativity. Moreover, our data reveal that the curvilinear effect of team voice on team creativity is moderated by temporal leadership in time-constrained teams.