What are the individual, relational, and contextual (organizational, social, cultural) factors that facilitate or hamper cross-group collaboration?
In the increasingly global and boundary-free business environment, successful technology innovation, knowledge transfer, and commercialization hinge on how effectively people are able to form and maintain collaborative relationships with diverse people with different team, organizational, national, or ethnic membership. According to social psychologists, however, the basic human tendency to see different others with an ingroup versus outgroup divisive mentality hampers fully utilizing diversity for cross-group collaborations. The goal of our research is to explicate the mechanisms that enable people to cross ingroup-boundaries and collaborate with unfamiliar, dissimilar outgroups in the multicultural environment. Our premise is that understanding the psychology of human social relationships is vital for innovation management. To this aim, we take an interdisciplinary approach: We use and extend theories of social relationships and culture from social, cultural, and developmental psychology to solve important management issues for innovation, such as intergroup knowledge sharing, creativity, innovative and risk-taking behavior, negotiation, multicultural teams, ethical decision making, and employee happiness.
