A Research of the Relations among Actual Diversity, Perceived Diversity and Team Innovation－Task Interdependence and Openness to Diversity as Moderators

• Main Authors: Jui-Yunn Chao, 趙瑞媛
• Other Authors: Ghi-Feng Yen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/01914435588539558880

碩士 === 中原大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 99 === Due to rapid change and development of science and technology in the 21st century, businesses have engaged vast impacts when industrial environment is full of complexity as well as uncertainty. To keep competitive advantages in a sustainable way, businesses put a lot of efforts to do research and development (R&D) on product innovation and to shorten the time to market. Therefore, businesses try to build up their R&D team in a more flexible, diversified and efficient way to meet the needs of globalization. The purpose of managing an effective R&D team with high performance of innovation has become an important emerging issue. The aims of this research are to investigate the influences of “actual team diversity” to “perceived team diversity” and its successive impacts on “team innovation (performance).” Actual team diversity includes bio-demographical diversity and task-related diversity, e.g. age, gender, birthplace, education, professional background, and tenure. This research tries further to find out what influences does actual team diversity have on perceived bio-demographical diversity as well as perceived task-related diversity. And “task interdependence” and “openness to diversity” are used as moderators to test the causal relations among actual diversity, perceived diversity and team innovation. A purposive sampling was adopted to collect the data. The authors contacted 180 team managers or supervisors and confirmed their willingness to answer the questionnaire. There were 104 valid teams data collected, including 104 team managers and 460 team members (564 questionnaires in total), resulting in the valid return ratio of 66.3%. Two statistical packages (SPSS 16.0 and AMOS 17) were used in this research to test the research hypotheses. From multiple regression analysis we have reached the following research findings: 1) “Actual team bio-demographic diversity” has positive influence on “perceived team bio-demographic diversity,” and “actual team task-related diversity” has positive influence on “perceived team task-related diversity;” 2) “perceived team bio-demographic diversity” has negative influence on “team innovation,” whereas “perceived team task-related diversity” has no significant influence on “team innovation;” 3) “openness to diversity” has moderating effect on the causal relationship of “perceived team bio-demographic diversity and team innovation.” However, “Task interdependence” shows no significant moderating effect. The author goes on to draw research conclusions, highlight managerial implications and raise some issues. Along with the suggestions for managers when operating a R&D team, directions for further research are also proposed in the end.