Superstar Alarm: Exploring the Dual Effects of Team Creative Star's Influence on Team Creativity

Although previous research has highlighted the disproportional contributions of star employees to their team, an emerging stream of work has begun to examine the potential negative consequences of team stars. Drawing on a social model of team creativity, we develop a dualistic model of the influences of team creative stars on team creativity. Specifically, we explore the role of different parts of the team (i.e., star and nonstar employees) and their interplay in driving team creativity from a micro-dynamic perspective. Utilizing a two-wave multisource field study, we find that a central star has a positively direct effect and a negatively indirect effect via nonstars’ learning on team creativity. Moreover, team coordination can buffer the tension between central stars and nonstars and mitigate the detrimental effect of a star’ centrality on nonstars’ learning behavior. Furthermore, team coordination also weakens the positively direct effect of a star’s centrality on team creativity. The study yields several important implications.