How Leaders Support Workgroup Members for Innovation

We examine the moderating effect of group faultlines on relationship between team leader’s teamwork behaviors and support for innovation as team climate. We argue that a leader can play an important role as a bridge between subgroups to reduce the negative influences of subgroups. By the process of leader’s teamwork behaviors reducing the negative aspects of subgroups, the only positive aspects of the subgroups in teams with strong faultline may be more emphasized. Thus we hypothesize that the effect of team leader’s teamwork behaviors on support for innovation is stronger for teams with strong faultline than those with weak faultline. We calculate group faultlines with demographic attributes (gender, age, and specialty) from 81 teams. Our results show that team leader’s teamwork behaviors contribute to support for innovation. And these influences are more effective under conditions of strong faultline teams than weak faultline teams.