Opinion Leaders, Social Capital, and Innovations in Teams

Abstract

The team-level innovation is critical for a team to consistently adapt to its changing environment by promoting its members creative ideas and behaviors. Relying on the social capital perspective, the current paper investigates team-level innovation and offers a theoretical framework to explain the interactive effects of individual and team-level attributes on team innovation. We argue that the team-level innovation will be affected by the opinion leaders social capital available from their external social relations and that such effects will be moderated by the team-level social capital that represents the cohesiveness and status similarity among team members.