Facilitating innovation in interdisciplinary teams: The role of leaders and integrative communication

Abstract

Aim/Purpose The complexity of scientific problems has spurred the development of trans-disciplinary science, in which experts are brought together to collaborate across disciplinary and practice boundaries. These knowledge diverse teams can pro-duce novel solutions, but they often fail to achieve their potential. Background Leaders have a crucial role to play in enabling effective collaboration among these diverse experts. We propose that a critical predictor of whether a newly formed interdisciplinary team will perform well is the leader's multidisciplinary breadth of experience, which we define as a leader's possession of significant expe-rience in multiple areas of research and practice. We suggest that these leaders will have the capability to skillfully manage the interactions within the team. Methodology We test our prediction in a sample of 52 newly formed interdisciplinary medical research teams. We also observe and examine the communication patterns in a subset of these teams. Contribution There is a lack of systematic study of the impact leaders have on newly formed interdisciplinary science teams whose members have little or no prior collabora-tive experience with each other, possess specialized knowledge, and have limited overlapping expertise. This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the effect of leader multidisciplinary experience on team communi-cation patterns and innovation. Findings Our study finds that teams are more innovative when their leader has a moder-ate breadth of multidisciplinary expertise. Exploration of team communication patterns suggests that leaders with moderate multidisciplinary breadth of expe-rience actively stimulated information sharing across expert domains by choos-ing cross-cutting topics and drew individuals' attention to the knowledge and approaches of others in the team. Recommendations for Practitioners Insights from this work can have practical implications regarding how to best select and train leaders to facilitate cross-boundary collaboration in transdisci-plinary science. This study elucidates a variety of communication strategies that leaders can to enhance the team innovativeness. Recommendation for Researchers Further investigation into the underlying psychological states that these com-munication strategies elicit is needed. Future research should investigate psycho-logical mediators such as knowledge consideration, perspective taking, and cog-nitive flexibility. Impact on Society Transdisciplinary science is needed to solve society's most complex problems. The more insight we gather about factors that can help these knowledge diverse teams to be successful, but more society will benefit. Future Research More research is needed on team formation, leader experience, and team out-comes in transdisciplinary science teams in a variety of contexts.