Team structural control and team resilience: An empirical study of creative project-based teams

• The paper studies team resilience in creative project teams in advertising. • Centralization and formalization in teams are negatively linked to team resilience. • The extent of these effects depends on the team membership stability. • Team resilience is positively related to team creativity. • The findings of this study offer relevant implications for praxis and academe. Given the turbulent business environment and the prevalence of project-team-based work structures, ensuring team resilience becomes necessary for contemporary organizations to overcome adversity and eventually succeed. Existing research suggests that structural team design is important for effective teamwork, but little is known about how it is associated with team resilience. Similarly, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how team resilience is related to team performance. Based on existing literature on teams, resilience, and organizational design and on multi-respondent survey data from 101 creative project-based advertising teams, this paper investigates how two team structural-control mechanisms – centralization and formalization – relate to team resilience, depending on team membership stability. To understand the further performance implications of team resilience, it uses the setting of creative teams to examine how team resilience is associated with team creativity. In the end, implications for research and practice are derived.