The More Identifying, the More Creative in Teams? Team Regulatory Focus as a Moderator

Regarding the relationship between identification and creativity, two theoretical logics compete, suggesting both positive and negative relationships. This study addresses the controversy by invoking regulatory focus theory. At the team level, we theorize that the identification–creativity relationship is positive in teams with a high promotion focus and negative in teams with a high prevention focus. Our empirical analysis based on data from 185 teams in 50 Korean companies, overall, supports our expectations, but it further reveals that the negative relationship in prevention-focused teams is found when the sense of team identification is uniformly shared, whereas the positive relationship in promotion-focused teams is found when the sense is dispersed among team members. The implications of our findings for both theory and practice are discussed