The dark side of team dynamics: how team differential atmosphere undermines team creativity

Team Differential Atmosphere (TDA)-a climate-level perception of rigid "insider" and "outsider" boundaries created by leaders based on relational closeness-has emerged as an important barrier to creativity in multicultural teams. Although inclusive leadership is widely recognized as a catalyst for innovation, the specific micro-mechanisms by which its opposite, TDA, disrupts team dynamics remain unclear. Drawing on Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT), this study positions TDA as a distinct signal of identity exclusion, distinguishing it from Leader-Member Exchange Differentiation (LMXD).

Data were collected from 79 innovation teams using a multi-source approach, and a moderated mediation model was developed and tested.

The results indicate that: (1) TDA, as a manifestation of non-inclusive leadership, significantly inhibits team creativity; (2) this inhibition occurs via two distinct pathways: team collaboration (reduced collaborative behaviors) and joint decision-making (impaired information integration); and (3) team empathy, as a key collective emotional resource, can buffer the detrimental effects of TDA on these processes.

This study contributes to the literature by distinguishing the "identity threat" signal of TDA from the performance-related signal of LMXD and by clarifying how differential structures can adversely affect team interaction processes and creativity at the team level. It further identifies Team Empathy as a bottom-up resilience resource that buffers these negative effects in multicultural teams.