Team Iungens Practice: A Behavioural Perspective to Bridge Demographic Faultlines and Relationship Conflicts for Team Creativity

Although employee diversity can contribute to team creativity, extant research has shown that, when diverse employees form strong demographic faultlines, subgroup identity separation and intensified relationship conflicts may be harmful to team creativity. Therefore, effective remedies in managing relationships and bridging identities between subgroups are urgently needed in these teams. Building on brokering research, we introduce team iungens practice (TIP) – so named from a Latin phrase meaning ‘joins or unites’ – as a new team process that team members or leaders can engage to forge and strengthen connections or facilitate new coordination among team members. We propose that teams can effectively utilize this behavioural strategy to bridge structural (faultline) and process (conflict) divides rooted in subgroup identity separation, thereby mitigating their negative impacts on team creativity. In Study 1, we developed and validated a scale to measure TIP. In Study 2, we found that TIPs effectively mitigated the positive effect of demographic faultline strength on relationship conflict and attenuated the negative impact of relationship conflict on team creativity from a multisource and multistage survey study. We demonstrate the value of TIPs as a behavioural strategy for managing demographic faultlines and relationship conflicts in teams.