Team job-related anxiety and creativity: Investigating team-level and cross-level moderated curvilinear relationships

Researchers have examined the effects of individual job-related anxiety on employee attitudes and behaviors but have yet to examine whether team job-related anxiety would have similar or different effects. Building on prior research on negative group affective tone and creativity, we propose that team job-related anxiety has an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship with both team and individual creativity. Furthermore, we posit that team cooperativeness moderates those curvilinear relationships. Using a two-wave research design and matched employee-supervisor data from 290 employees nested in 65 teams, we found support for the proposed inverted U-shaped relationships. Moreover, the intermediate level of team job-related anxiety was associated with higher individual creativity in teams with higher cooperativeness. We conclude the study with a discussion of the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.