Organizations are increasingly using teams to stimulate innovation. Often, these teams share knowledge and information with each other to help achieve their goals, while also competing for resources and striving to outperform each other. Importantly, based on their industry, the nature of work, or prior history, some teams may face more competition from peer teams than others. Our research examines how teams' competitive relations with other teams in the organization operate in tandem with their collaborative inter-team information exchange relations in impacting their innovation. Using two studies-a field study of 73 knowledge-intensive teams in high-tech engineering firms and a team-based network experimental study of 162 teams-we find that a high degree of overall competition with many peer teams reduces a focal team's ability to acquire and utilize diverse knowledge from these teams (i.e., inter-team knowledge integration), thereby hindering team innovation. However, applying insights from network structural hole theory, we find that when a focal team occupies a brokerage position in the inter-team information exchange network, this can help buffer the effects of competition in getting access to knowledge resources from other teams, thus enabling their innovation. Additionally, we find that focal broker teams' dealmaking and network obstruction behaviors explain these effects. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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应对团队间竞争：信息经纪人团队如何实现团队创新。


组织越来越多地利用团队来刺激创新。通常，这些团队会相互共享知识和信息，以帮助实现他们的目标，同时也会争夺资源并努力超越对方。重要的是，根据其行业、工作性质或以往的历史，某些团队可能会比其他团队面临更多来自同行团队的竞争。我们的研究考察了团队与组织中其他团队的竞争关系如何与团队间协作信息交换关系协同运作，从而影响其创新。通过两项研究——对高科技工程公司 73 个知识密集型团队的实地研究和对 162 个团队的基于团队的网络实验研究——我们发现，与许多同行团队的高度整体竞争降低了焦点团队的能力。从这些团队中获取和利用多样化的知识（即团队间知识整合），从而阻碍团队创新。然而，应用网络结构洞理论的见解，我们发现，当焦点团队在团队间信息交换网络中占据中介位置时，这有助于缓冲其他团队获取知识资源的竞争效应，从而使他们的创新。此外，我们发现焦点经纪团队的交易撮合和网络阻碍行为可以解释这些影响。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。