Understanding the Role of Profession in Multidisciplinary Team Innovation: Professional Identity, Minority Dissent and Team Innovation

Abstract Organizational teams are capable of addressing complex and multifaceted problems through innovative solutions, but their capacity to innovate is far from guaranteed. The quest to address this dilemma has yet to explore the interactive roles of professional and team identification; a surprising omission as both professional and team identification have been separately shown to play an important role in determining team innovation. Responding to this research gap, we explore the potential for professional identity salience to enhance or undermine healthcare team innovation through minority dissent, and argue that team identification is capable of differentiating between these two contrasting effects. Our survey‐based study of 63 US healthcare teams supports our moderated mediation model, which provides evidence of the potential complementarity of different forms of identification and opens an opportunity for teams to reap the benefits, as well as avoid the detriments, typically associated with each form.