Abstract:

Organizational routines can provide stability and efficiency for enterprise development, but sometimes they become worthless or even become outdated longer because they cannot adapt to the environment. Constructive deviance is a bottom-up driving force for organizational routine innovation and change from employees, but the existing research is still very lacking on this topic. At the same time, the essential nature of the normative challenge makes it difficult for constructive deviance to unfold at the individual level. In view of this, this project focuses on the team constructive deviance. Based on developing the relevant behavior scale and event list, the project integrates event system theory and group cognitive-affective dual-process, using the research methods of interview, time-lagged design and experiment to explore the antecedents and outcomes of team constructive deviance in the context of organizational rigidity.
Specifically, the study includes: (1) developing a team constructive deviance scale and an event inventory to lay the foundation for subsequent research; (2) examining how the events of rigidity in organizational routines contributes to team constructive deviance by inducing team normative conflict and team psychological discomfort, as well as the moderating role of environmental uncertainty and team cohesion in the above process; (3) exploring the inverted U-shaped relationship between team constructive deviance and organizational routine updating to inquire into the "degree" of constructive team deviance and the mediating role of bystander team reflexivity and bystander team activating moods in the above process and the moderating role of inter-team differences perception.
The research results not only advance the previous research on constructive deviance, but also provide inspiration for exploring the black box process of organizational routine evolution. The specific theoretical contributions are as follows: First, the proposal of team constructive deviance. Team constructive deviance contains interactive elements that are not present in individual-level constructive deviance, which originate from the mutual imprinting of team members in terms of identity or identification, and mutual infection and influence in terms of emotion and cognition. These processes and mechanisms lead to the existence of shared strong or weak constructive deviance in teams. Further, exploring and developing structural models and measurement tools of team constructive deviance in local companies can provide us with a more comprehensive understanding of constructive deviance and is expected to provide new breakthroughs in theoretical and empirical research on constructive deviance. Second, team constructive deviance is used to gain insight into the process of organizational routine evolution. Using team constructive deviance as a key element in dissecting the process of organizational routine evolution helps to identify and shape the bottom-up routine change driving force of routine evolution, which effectively complements the previous top-down routine evolution driving approach and innovatively constructs a docking study between micro-level and macro-level. Third, event system theory and team cognitive-affective dual-path model. The forming and influencing process of team constructive deviance in the process of organizational routine evolution relies on the role of situational events and follows the process of “situational events - team cognition-emotion dual-path - team behavior decision”. The event perspective and the process model of team cognition-emotion dual-path proposed in this study are effective extensions of previous studies that focused on traits such as individual stability characteristics, leadership styles, and group characteristics. In addition, this study also considers situational and entity characteristics based on the process model, which provides useful insights for subsequent research on the mixture of traits and processes.

Key words: team constructive deviance, organizational routine updating, team learning, team cognitive-affective dual-path, event system theory