James L. Farr’s research while affiliated with Pennsylvania State University and other places

Two broad sets of activities underlie team innovation: the creation and the implementation of new ideas. Despite the prevalence of this distinction, the temporal dynamics of creativity and implementation in teams and their relation to successful team innovation are not well understood. Building on and integrating linear phase models and complexity perspectives on the innovation process, we propose a temporal pattern of creativity and implementation that is linked to team innovation. We examine this temporal pattern in a longitudinal study of 76 project teams. Results show that teams engage in creativity throughout the entire life cycle of team projects; however, innovative teams refrain from focusing on implementation in early time frames and increase their focus on implementation over the course of the project. Episodes of unconstrained creativity in early time frames of a project appear to be a critical factor for team innovation. Our research provides a foundation for future research on team innovation that explicitly considers the temporal interplay of creativity and implementation. Practitioner points • Creativity is a critical factor for team innovation that is relevant not only in the beginning of a team project but throughout its entire life cycle. • Teams achieve innovative outcomes if they refrain from focusing on implementation early on and instead allow for prolonged episodes of unconstrained creativity. • Innovative teams pay attention to the timing of implementation activities and increase their focus on implementation around the mid‐point of a project.

Purpose The current article reviews extant knowledge on courage and identifies a dimension of courage relevant to modern organizations, social courage, which is an (a) intentional, (b) deliberate, and (c) altruistic behavior that (d) may damage the actor’s esteem in the eyes of others. Through a multiple-study process, quantitative inferences are derived about social courage, and the Workplace Social Courage Scale (WSCS) is created. Design Four studies using seven samples analyze the WSCS’s psychometric properties, internal consistency, method effects, discriminant validity, convergent validity, concurrent validity, and utility. Many of these are investigated or replicated in largely working adult samples. Findings Each aspect of the WSCS approaches or meets specified guidelines. Also, social courage is significantly related to organizational citizenship behaviors, and the construct may relate to many other important workplace outcomes. Implications The current study is among the first to quantitatively demonstrate the existence of courage as a construct, and the discovered relationships are the first statistical inferences about social courage. Future research and practice can now apply the WSCS to better understand the impact of social courage within the workplace. Originality Despite many attempts, no author has created a satisfactory measure of courage, and the current article presents the first successful measure through focusing on a particular courage dimension—social courage. Future research should take interest in the created measure, the WSCS, as its application can derive future inferences about courage and social courage.

Symposium on Evidence-based leadership and how it can improve the success rate of innovation. Quantitative review of empirical evidence of effectiveness of different leadership styles.

Abstract Innovation, the development and intentional introduction of new and useful ideas by individuals, teams, and organizations, lies at the heart of human adaptation. Decades of research in different disciplines and atdifferent organizational levelshave produced a wealth of knowledge,about how innovation emerges and the factors that facilitateand inhibit innovation. We propose that this knowledge needs integration. Inan initial step towardthis goal, we apply a dialectic perspective on innovation to overcome limitations of dichotomous reasoning and to

We have proposed that a dialectic perspective on innovation may serve well as a first step of an integrative framework for research on innovation and for effective practice. We would like to thank all commentators for their stimulating and challenging ideas and SIOP for enabling this dialog. In keeping with the process view inherent to dialectic thinking, we would like to use this reply to refine and extend the core ideas presented in the focal article by means of integrating explanatory concepts, by critically examining the add-on value of a dialectic perspective, and by pointing out future research needs and ideas for management.