Better together: Leveraging creative climates to enhance innovative sourcing team performance

In today’s complex and challenging business environment, there is a growing need for innovative sourcing solutions to ensure value creation. Consequently, companies are increasingly delegating their sourcing projects to cross-functional sourcing teams, which must leverage their functional expertise and collective creativity to boast innovative performance. This study draws on social cognitive theory and organizational climate research to investigate the drivers, boundary conditions, and performance implications of a team creativity climate. It shows that team members’ beliefs in their creative capabilities determine the creative climate in innovative sourcing teams. Our findings reveal that these teams do not only require highly facilitative leaders to impact the creativity climate but also functional diversity within the team to leverage the link between task-related capabilities and the team’s creativity climate. Furthermore, our results indicate that the team creativity climate is constitutive of effective sourcing strategies, which explains almost two-third of the variance of a sourcing team’s innovative performance. Through this perspective, this study advances scholarly and managerial knowledge regarding the emergence and impact of creative climates within sourcing teams, offering both implications and research directions. • Drawing on social cognitive theory, this study investigates drivers, boundary conditions, and performance implications of a sourcing team’s creativity climate. • Team members’ beliefs in their creative capabilities determine the creative climate in innovative sourcing teams. • Highly facilitative sourcing team leaders positively impact the team creativity climate • Functional diversity leverages the link between task-related capabilities and the sourcing team’s creativity climate. • Team creativity climate is constitutive of effective sourcing strategies, which explains almost 2/3 of the variance of a sourcing team’s innovative performance.