How lack of clarity fuels team innovation

In today’s competitive business environment, innovation is an often-heard mantra that eclipses all else. At the same time, teamwork has also gained greatly in importance, supported by the rise of workplace tools such as Slack, which has brought a “social media” designed for collaborative corporate culture. While organisations must have individuals working together to create innovation, do excellence and innovation actually arise from having clearly defined goals that all employees must universally support?  

This is a question set out in a new study by Dr John Lai, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) Business School. Will goal clarity lower team innovation? A moderated mediation model of inter-team trust is a body of research between Dr Lai and Steven Lui at the UNSW Business School, Ben Luo Nanfeng at Renmin University of China, and Peter Moran at China Europe International Business School. Their work challenges conventional views that clear goals make innovation more likely.  

“When a team’s goal is clear, team members become more selective in the information they are motivated to seek and acquire and less selective in what they screen out,” says Dr Lai. “This resulting selectivity and commonality of knowledge sought by each team member suggests that the team as a whole is more likely to acquire less knowledge.”  

Many existing studies have assessed the question of whether clear goals foster innovation due to a “team climate” or “knowledge integration” perspective. In team climate thinking, a clear strategy makes for more cohesiveness among teams. From a knowledge integration point of view, if the workplace is a trusting environment, innovation should further increase with more knowledge acquisition and sharing.  

Dr Lai and his collaborators challenged the team climate perspective for neglecting how having clear goals affects gathering and disseminating knowledge. As the researchers point out, goal clarity could inadvertently restrict learning. The team also indicated that while trust is crucial to innovation, it is not uniform or universal within organisations. Some colleagues and teams can get along, while others have relationships that are marked by distrust. This will impact how much innovation can take place.  

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