Entrepreneurial Team Knowledge Diversity and Creativity: A Multilevel Analysis of Knowledge Sharing, Individual Creativity, and Team Creativity

Although the academic community has consistent with the key role of entrepreneurial team knowledge diversity (ETKD), which serves as a critical catalyst of creativity in organizations, the extant research on the link between knowledge diversity and creativity is mainly concerned with individual creativity in single-level analyses. With emerging entrepreneurial ventures increasingly relying on innovation enhancement in the form of teams, there is research motivation to explore how team-level creativity develops. In this sense, this study attempts to investigate the underlying mechanism through which ETKD is associated with team-level creativity. Through a multilevel mediation model, this study proposes that ETKD can facilitate team creativity (TC) sequentially transmitted through individual-level team members' knowledge sharing (KS) and creativity. Based on a survey of 252 team members from 42 entrepreneurial teams in China, multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) is applied to test the top-down relationship between ETKD and KS, as well as the bottom-up link between individual creativity and TC. The findings show that our hypotheses are supported. Our findings provide some of the first empirical evidence to examine how knowledge-based diversity of entrepreneurial teams facilitates TC potential by multilevel approach. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are also offered.