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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1501633
This article is part of the Research Topic Creative Organization Development through Leadership View all 8 articles

Generational Diversity and Team Innovation: The Roles of Conflict and Shared Leadership

Provisionally accepted
Lingyi Wang Lingyi Wang 1,2*Xu Duan Xu Duan 1
  • 1 Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macao, SAR China
  • 2 School of Business, Macau, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The increasing generational diversity in modern teams has sparked an ongoing debate about its impact on team performance. Grounded in decision-making and social identity theories, this study explores the multifaceted relationship between generational diversity and team innovation performance, examining the mediating roles of cognitive and affective conflicts and the moderating role of shared leadership. The findings from a three-wave survey of five multi-generational teams in a Chinese organization reveal that generational diversity predicts both cognitive and affective conflicts, which subsequently exert opposing effects on team innovation. Shared leadership positively moderates the relationship between cognitive conflict and team innovation, amplifying the indirect positive effect of generational diversity. However, shared leadership does not moderate the relationship between affective conflict and team innovation. These results offer a more nuanced understanding of the dual role of generational diversity in team innovation and underscore the importance of shared leadership in harnessing its potential benefits.

    Keywords: generational diversity, cognitive conflict, affective conflict, Shared leadership, Team innovation performance

    Received: 25 Sep 2024; Accepted: 20 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Wang and Duan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Lingyi Wang, Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macao, SAR China

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.