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Research on the cross-level influence mechanism of team emotional intelligence on employees’ creative self-efficacy and innovation performance: the moderating effect of team identification

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Abstract

It is considered that high emotional intelligence teams bring high innovation performance to team members by improving their creative self-efficacy, but there is a lack of empirical research on its mechanism and whether it is scientific. The study constructs the cross-level mechanism model of team emotional intelligence on employee creative self-efficacy and innovation performance, discusses how team emotional intelligence affects employees’ innovation performance, the mediating role of employee creative self-efficacy, and moderating role of team identity. The study uses multi-level data from multiple sources, namely, 50 teams and 250 team members from different firms in China. The results show that: Team emotional intelligence has a cross-level positive impact on employees’ innovation performance; Team emotional intelligence has a significant positive impact on creative self-efficacy, creative self-efficacy has a significant positive impact on employees’ innovation performance, and creative self-efficacy plays a mediating effect between team emotional intelligence and employees’ innovation performance; Team identity plays a positive moderating role between team emotional intelligence and creative self-efficacy.

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Data availability

The datasets analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was partially supported by a grant from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project No. 31971029).

Funding

The paper was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China: Research on Statistical Methods of Structural Equation Models for Multivariate Non-normal Data (31971029).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China

    Youran Sun & Sihan Chen

  2. Business School, Nanjing Xiaozhuang University, Nanjing, 210003, China

    Youran Sun & Rong Wang

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  1. Youran Sun
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Correspondence to Rong Wang.

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Sun, Y., Chen, S. & Wang, R. Research on the cross-level influence mechanism of team emotional intelligence on employees’ creative self-efficacy and innovation performance: the moderating effect of team identification. Curr Psychol 43, 9553–9566 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05092-0

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