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The Curvilinear Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Team Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Faultlines

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Abstract

In this study, we built and tested a theoretical model to determine how ethical leadership affects team creativity among teams composed of different characteristics. Following social learning theory and an antecedent–benefit–cost framework, we conducted analyses of multisource data from 50 team supervisors and 186 employees, which revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity. The teams exhibited more creativity when there was a moderate level of ethical leadership than when there were very low or very high levels. Moreover, from an interactional perspective, we found that team faultlines significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship between ethical leadership and team creativity such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more significant among teams with weak team faultlines. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

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Notes

  1. According to Meyer and Glenz (2013), when calculating ASW, the continuous attributes were entered directly while the categorical attributes were dummy coded first. In line with Thatcher et al. (2003), the value of each dummy variable was set to 1/\(\sqrt 2\) for individuals who belonged to a given category, and to zero for those who did not.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by Grant No. 71372056 awarded to **ao-Yun **e, Grant No. 71302102 awarded to Shenjiang Mo, and Grant No. 71232012 awarded to Zhongming Wang from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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  1. School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Shenjiang Mo, Chu-Ding Ling & **ao-Yun **e

  2. Department of Management and Marketing, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Chu-Ding Ling

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Mo, S., Ling, CD. & **e, XY. The Curvilinear Relationship Between Ethical Leadership and Team Creativity: The Moderating Role of Team Faultlines. J Bus Ethics 154, 229–242 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-016-3430-1

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