From Having to Using: The Nonlinear Impacts of Educational Background Diversity on Team Innovation

Over the past two decades, researches of the relationship between team diversity and team innovation have yielded mixed findings. Drawing upon the dynamic capability perspective, we argue that this is because previous studies have ignored the importance of team's capability on diversity utilization. In the current study, by adding knowledge integration capability into our study, we have made great effort to disentangle the mixed relationship between team educational-background diversity and team innovation, and argued that team learning, as a comprehensively team process, actually accounts for the mechanism underlying the above relationship. Based on a 51 work-team sample, the results provide supports for the significant moderating role of knowledge integration capability on the curvilinear relationship between diversity and team innovation, which can further be explained by the mediation effect of team learning. Research implications and the directions for future researches have also been discussed.