Cheng Chen, Yingjie Yuan, Stefan Berger and Bernard Nijstad win Academy of Management Best Dissertation-based Paper Award

PhD candidate Cheng Chen and her team have won the Best Dissertation-based Paper Award of the Organizational Behavior division at the annual Academy of Management Conference. They received the award for the paper titled ‘The Benefits of Redundancy: External Contact Duplication, Information Sharing, and Team Creativity’ .

Cheng Chen is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Economics and Business’ (FEB) department of Human Resource Management and Organizational Behaviour (HRM & OB). Her co-authors Yingjie Yuan, Stefan Berger and Bernard Nijstad are her PhD supervisors, all colleagues from FEB’s HRM&OB department. In their paper, they explore the counterintuitive notion that structural redundancy in a team’s external network—often seen as a lack of uniqueness or diversity—can actually benefit team creativity by enhancing the sharing of externally acquired information in teams.

Adopting a team composition view, rather than a team global view, the authors introduce a new conceptualization of network structural redundancy, namely external contact duplication, which captures the degree to which individual team members have the same external contacts. Drawing on team information processing and social network research, they highlight the previously overlooked information processing benefits of redundancy for team creativity.

Chen and co-authors hypothesize that external contact duplication stimulates intra-team external information sharing (the dissemination of externally acquired information among team members) by enabling team members’ social validation and common interpretation of external information, and this in turn fosters team creativity. Overall, their study suggests a more nuanced understanding of network structural redundancy and highlights an alternative mechanism through which it influences team creativity.

Chen has led this research project over the past years, as part of her dissertation, which she shall soon complete. In her dissertation, she studies topics including team creativity/innovation, boundary spanning, information processing, social networks, and knowledge absorption. Chen is honored to receive this recognition for her work and is grateful for the support of her supervisors/co-authors along the way. “I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Bernard Nijstad, Stefan Berger, and Yingjie Yuan, for their consistent support on my dissertation and beyond.”

Questions? Please contact Cheng Chen.