Abstract:

Team counts as the most important innovative unit in an organization. Most previous studies, while investigating such macroscopic elements as strategies that influence innovation, are relatively found inadequate for stressing micro-factors related to “humans”. Taking the lens of the “implicit theory of cognition and applying methods of follow-up questionnaires and QCA, this project launches a series of inquiries into the relation between team growth mindsets and team innovation. Its main innovations are as follows: First, the selection of topics. In recent years, amid the extreme challenges of global business competition, organizations or teams with top-level resources are not always successful in innovation. Those talented teams will eventually become “mediocre”, whereas a number of seemingly ordinary teams win out with extraordinary innovation. Starting from the phenomenon, this project closely follows the current practical needs of enterprise reform and innovation, breaks the existing conventions and limitations of attention research, introduces the composition and configuration of attention breadth and attention depth, and pinpoints the focus to the team growth mindsets in a breakthrough way, with a series of original researches around it. The selection of this topic has found a new breakthrough for the research based on the attention perspective and team innovation, and opened up a broad explorative space. At the same time, it provides a new starting point for enterprises to stimulate the enthusiasm of team reform and innovation. Second, the theoretical conception. Up to now, investigations on team innovation have mainly focused on the situational factors and the explicit theory of cognition, overlooking the function of analyzing the internal operating mechanism of the team innovation process from the implicit theory of cognition. Based on two research perspectives of attention composition and attention configuration, this project carries out a series of in-depth and systematic empirical explorations on the topic of the internal relationship between team growth mindsets and attention, in order to improve the understanding of the role of growth mindsets in innovation teams, including how team growth mindsets triggers attention, protects attention overload and avoids insufficient intensity. Based on the basic idea of attention, this project not only investigates the mechanism of team growth mindsets leading to innovation by triggering the breadth and depth of attention respectively; It also stresses the constructive connotation of attention, tries to open up this concept, and tests the “bright side” and “dark side” and their boundary conditions formed between attention configuration and team innovation. It enriches and expands the relevant theoretical knowledge of team growth mindsets and innovation, and embodies the outstanding characteristics of preciseness, depth and systematicness in theoretical conception. Third, the research methods. Combined with the latest research trends in the field of organization management, and meeting the specific needs of research topics, a variety of research methods are comprehensively adopted, including in-depth interviews, multi-point questionnaires, case studies, QCA methods, etc. It is helpful to explore the objective laws of team growth mindsets and innovation, and strengthen the internal and external validity of research results. The theoretical significance of this project is to turn attention research to the discussion of its antecedents and mechanisms. In addition, the projects attaches importance to the studies of the “paradoxical” relationship between attention structure and innovation, and the way team growth mindsets negotiate between attention structure and innovation, in that these studies provide scientific basis for the management practice of enterprises to stimulate team growth mentality and shape the cultural atmosphere of team reform and innovation.

Key words: team growth mindsets, team innovation, attention composition, attention configuration