UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Andreas Richter , Cambridge University, to host a research seminar discussing;  A Leader Temporality Perspective on the Link between Negative Feedback and Team Creativity.

Abstract:

Team leaders often struggle to realize creative ambitions with and through their teams, looking for negative feedback to reduce this uncertainty. However, the broader literature on negative feedback and creativity suggests recipients often fail to capitalize on the opportunities for improvement that it offers and has left the role of team leaders in this process unaddressed. This research aims to provide insights into the role of team leaders in leveraging negative feedback to enhance their teams’ creativity. To achieve this, we propose a leader temporality perspective that views negative feedback and team creativity as temporally charged constructs susceptible to team leader temporal traits. Drawing on the concept of temporal focus, we propose that team leaders with high, rather than low, future focus are more likely to respond to negative feedback by encouraging their teams to exert more efforts in improving creativity. By contrast, those leaders with high, compared to low, present focus are more likely to perceive negative feedback as a pessimistic signal that creative outcomes cannot be realized in the present moment, and thus are less likely to encourage team creativity in response to negative feedback. Leader encouragement of team creativity, in turn, fosters team creativity through increased team information elaboration. We support these propositions with multi-source, temporally staggered data from a sample of 129 designer teams at an East Asian company. Based on the leader temporality perspective we offer, we contribute to the literatures on negative feedback and creativity, subjective time and creativity, as well as team leadership.