Age/gender Faultlines and Team Innovation Behavior - Exploring the Role of Differentiated Leadership Behavior

Purpose
Demographic age/gender faultlines might be a risk for the for the innovation behavior especially in teams working in the R&D sector of companies. Therefore, our research investigates differentiated leadership behavior— defined as differentiation of the individual dimensions (individual consideration, intellectual stimulation) of the transformational leadership construct (Wang & Howell, 2010; Wu et al., 2010)—as an intervention strategy to at least buffer the negative implications of these faultlines on innovation behavior.

Design/methodology/approach
Study hypotheses are tested among a multisource sample of 89 R&D teams from a German automotive company applying regression techniques.

Results
Age/gender faultlines are found to be strongly negative related to innovation behavior in R&D teams. This effect however is buffered by high levels of differentiated leadership behavior in these teams. These effects also hold, when controlling for collective focused leadership behavior as a competitive moderator. Limitations Hypotheses were tested in a cross‐sectional data set, which does not allow for conclusions of causality.

Practical Implications
Differentiated leadership is identified as promising leadership strategy to preserve innovation behavior in demographically diverse teams.

Originality values
In contrast to the existing diversity literature, which proposed collective focused leadership behavior as the most valuable leadership behavior in diverse teams (e.g., Kearney & Gebert, 2009; Kunze & Bruch, 2010), we argue that in teams with strong age/gender faultlines a differentiated individual leadership behavior, valuing the individual strengths of each employee might be more promising strategy to at least buffer the negative effects on innovation behavior.