Team Job-Related Anxiety and Creativity: Investigating a Moderated Curvilinear Relationship

Job-related anxiety has been investigated to have significant effect on employee attitudes and behaviors. Drawing from activation theory and information processing perspective, we explored whether anxiety affects creativity and examined the curvilinear relationship between team anxiety and employee creativity. Furthermore, we posited that employee authentic pride and team cooperativeness would moderate this relationship. Based on a three-wave research design, results from 65 teams and 290 employees supported an inverted U-shaped team anxiety-creativity relationship. Meanwhile, it showed that employees with high authentic pride or in high cooperative teams will produce more creativity under intermediate level of team anxiety. Finally, implications of these results for future research and practice were discussed.