Topic: A Social-structural Analysis of Employee-organization Relationships And Team Creativity

Speaker: Jason D. Shaw, Ph.D.

Professor and Curtis L. Carlson School-wide Professor

Associate Editor, Academy of Management Journal

University of Minnesota / Carlson School of Management

Time: 12:30-14:00pm,Tuesday,October 25, 2011

Location: Room 216, New Building of GSM, Peking University.

Abstract

In this study, we developed and tested the hypotheses that the mutualinvestment form of employment system (an employment relationship inwhich the employer expects a high level and broad set of contributionsfrom employees and provides extensive and long-term inducements toemployees), relative to other forms, would relate positively to workteam creativity, mediated by within-team work-related communicationnetwork density. We further hypothesized that the advantages of highercommunication network density would be stronger in work teams withhigher task complexity. We found support for these hypotheses in atwo-wave study of 233 work teams in 55 Chinese organizations. We discussthe implications of this study for future research on employmentrelationships.