Multiple climates and unintended impacts on team innovation

Taking a domain-specific approach, innovation scholars have predominantly focused on and demonstrated the positive role of support for innovation climate— “the expectation, approval and practical support of attempts to introduce new and improved ways of doing things” (West, 1990, p. 315)—in team innovation (Chen, Farh, Campbell-Bush, Wu, & Wu, 2013; refer to Hulsheger, Anderson, & Salgado, 2009 for a review). In parallel, other scholars have examined service climate and service performance, and safety climate and safety performance, respectively, following the same domain-specific approach (e.g., innovation climate influences innovation, and safety climate influences safety). In a departure, we raise the following questions: Do service and safety climate also influence team innovation, and if so, how? Do they influence team innovation jointly with support for innovation climate? Drawing on regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997, 1998), we postulate that both support for innovation climate and service climate foster team promotion focus and, therefore, enhance team innovation, whereas safety climate fosters team prevention focus and, therefore, hampers team innovation. We also postulate the joint effects of different climates on team innovation through team prevention or promotion focus. We conducted two field studies and results largely supported our postulations.